PEACH BOTTOM, Pa. -- Every spring, Scott Brinton pumps about a million gallons of hog manure onto farm fields overlooking the Susquehanna River - the largest source of water for the Chesapeake Bay.
Brinton feeds 3,000 pigs in a metal building a few miles north of the Maryland line, and their waste fertilizes his 375 acres of corn and soybeans. He is frustrated that two Pennsylvania environmental groups sent him a letter threatening to sue if he didn't apply for a permit that would require him do more to prevent runoff into the river.
"I think they are being a little overly forceful," said Brinton, 42, a third-generation farmer. "They are doing some strong arm-twisting ... really putting you under the gun."
The decision to use litigation to attack what many regard as the bay's No. 1 problem - agricultural pollution, much of it from Pennsylvania - is being criticized by some farmers, who say they're overburdened with expensive and ever-changing fertilizer control requirements.
The aggressive approach is also drawing notice among environmentalists, who are more accustomed to suing power company executives than family farmers like Brinton.
PennFuture, an environmental group based in Harrisburg, has compiled a list of about 250 livestock operations in Pennsylvania that it believes are breaking federal and state water pollution laws. Working with another group, called the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper, the advocates began going down their list this month, sending out notices of intent to sue the five farms closest to the Susquehanna.
Howard Ernst, a political science professor at the Naval Academy, says PennFuture and the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper are filling a vacuum by using lawsuits to fight water pollution - an important step that he said the region's biggest environmental group, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, refuses to take.
Instead of suing farmers, the foundation has launched a "Save the Farm, Save the Bay" campaign to lobby the state and federal governments for millions of dollars to pay farmers to install fences, buffer strips and other runoff controls.
"The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has chosen to use carrots - government funding - while these other groups have chosen to use sticks - lawsuits," said Ernst, who studies bay restoration. "At the end of the day, it will probably take both to address the sizable pollution coming out of Pennsylvania."
He says the problem with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's approach is "the taxpayers are left to pay the bill." The advantage of lawsuits, he says, is that they "require polluters to pay for their own waste."
Will Baker, the foundation's president, says his group has sued developers, factories, coal-fired power plants, the federal government and others to help clean up the bay. But the group doesn't sue farmers because it believes that it's more effective to work cooperatively with them to help them reduce runoff.
"We are trying to encourage farmers to stay in agriculture because when they go out of business, they are replaced by hard, developed land uses such as shopping centers, highways and commercial facilities," Baker said. "And then the total impact on the environment is greater."
Meanwhile, a debate is simmering nationally over whether livestock businesses should be required to apply for the water pollution permits.
Under current federal regulations, confined animal feeding operations of a certain size - for example, 750 pigs averaging 55 pounds or more - must apply for permits designed to prevent manure from being washed by rain into streams.
These permits, issued by state governments, require the farmers to allow inspectors onto their property once a year to inspect waste lagoons to make sure they aren't leaking, said Jim Spontak, regional manager of watershed management for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Among other steps, the permits restrict farmers from spreading manure on fields closer than 100 feet from waterways or require a 35-foot filter strip of trees and bushes between the fields and the water. The permits cost $500 in Pennsylvania, plus sometimes thousands of dollars in fees to consultants who plan runoff-control systems.
The Bush administration has proposed revising those regulations so that livestock operations would no longer have a duty to apply for permits unless there's proof they are discharging pollution, said William J. Gerlach, an attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that coordinates the efforts of local "riverkeeper" organizations.
The problem with requiring proof is that, while almost all farms leak manure, the pollution is hard to document because there are no pipes to monitor, Gerlach said. Rain slowly and invisibly flushes fertilizer through the soil and into streams and drinking water supplies, he said.
Michael Formica, an attorney for the National Pork Producers Council, disagreed. "The vast majority of pork producers are zero-discharge, and our guys shouldn't have to get permits if they don't discharge," he said.
One Lancaster County farmer who got a legal notice this month claims that the water permit requirements are so expensive they're forcing him out of business.
Mark Ebaugh, 42, owner of Holtwood Pork Farm, said he and a business associate recently sold the 700 sows that Ebaugh had used to breed more than 3,000 piglets a year. Ebaugh said he supports his wife and three children on the roughly $35,000 he earns annually from the farm and can't afford to spend thousands of dollars to install the pipes for an underground waste-monitoring system that would be required with a permit.
"We are going to have to find another kind of work," Ebaugh said. He suggested the government should help to pay to install the waste-control system since the government is requiring it. "There is just not enough profit margin for us to afford the permitting process," he said.
PennFuture attorney Kimberly Snell-Zarcone said forcing farmers to comply with environmental laws has become more important as small family farms have evolved over the years into industrial-style animal feeding operations. "If we are losing farms that are causing pollution and sacrificing the bay, that's probably not a bad thing," she said.
The five farmers served with the legal notices all live in Lancaster County, which has 5,000 farms, the most in the region. The county's 949 square miles of scenic, rolling hills represent 1.5 percent of the Chesapeake Bay's watershed but produce more nitrogen pollution from manure than any other county - about 72 million pounds a year, or about 12 percent of the total in the watershed, according to a Chesapeake Bay Foundation report. An estimated 43 percent of the total pollution entering the bay flows down the Susquehanna River from Pennsylvania and New York, according to the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper.
On a recent afternoon, Brinton offered a tour of his hog operation. He tugged open the door of a 240-foot-long, 100-foot-wide gray steel building with huge fans at either end. "I'm used to it, but the ammonia will knock you over," he warned.
Inside the dim hangar-like structure, 3,000 young pigs - each about 35 pounds, the size of small dogs - were crowded in groups of 20 into 8-foot-wide metal pens. The sea of pinkish bodies surged in waves toward feeding troughs operated by machines.
When the pigs defecate, the waste falls through slats in the floor into an 800,000 gallon underground tank. In the spring, Brinton uses a system of hoses to irrigate the waste into his corn and soybean fields - a process he says keeps manure from the river.
Even without a water pollution permit, Brinton said he had to file a nutrient management plan with the state requiring him to use only as much fertilizer as his crops need. Under that plan, he also must report where all his manure is going.
The day after he received the legal notice from PennFuture, Brinton said he hired a consultant for $1,400 to file his application for a state permit. He said he didn't apply earlier because he didn't keep up with changing regulations.
When he gets the permit, he will be required to do more - including allowing a state inspector onto his property every year to make sure his manure tank isn't leaking. And he'll need to test eight to 10 soil samples annually on each of his 55 fields to see whether they are oversaturated with fertilizer, which could mean runoff into the Susquehanna.
"People who say we're over- fertilizing, and that's the problem with the Chesapeake Bay, they don't know what they are talking about," Brinton said. "We don't put on more manure than we use, because over-applying fertilizer hurts your crops. You would be cutting your own throat if you did that."
tom.pelton@baltsun.com