Fewer farmers using Ocean City’s sludge

OCEAN CITY — Fewer farmers are using Ocean City‘s processed sludge as fertilizer, leaving the resort to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to send the mess to the dump — when it used to give it away for free.

Brooks Clayville is a farmer in Snow Hill, where he grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley. He’s also a licensed and certified nutrient management consultant, meaning other farmers come to him for advice on things like biosolids.

Clayville said, as a farmer, “it comes back to a timing issue for me. Ocean City has sludge to get rid of. I don’t have a place to store it over winter. I can’t use it when it’s supposed to be used, timing and all, so I just can’t take it.”

He said the most obvious problem is the lack of alignment between the growing season and the tourist season. When fields are planted and crops are growing is when Ocean City most needs to get rid of the biosolids. But farmers won’t actually need them until fall or even winter.

“Right from the get-go, the cycles aren’t matched up,” Clayville said. “That’s nobody’s fault; that’s just how things are.”

More pressing, he added, is a proposal being floated at the state level that would prohibit the use of biosolids between November and February. The pitch isn’t final, though it’s getting a lot of people’s attention.

And of course, there’s the Hudson Farm lawsuit, scheduled for trial in federal court this October.

“I will say, the lawsuit that the [Waterkeeper Alliance] filed, that did not help the issue locally at all,” Clayville said. “I hate to admit that, but I know they scared some folks: ‘Who might get sued next?'”

The issue first came to light when the director of the Assateague Coastal Trust, Kathy Phillips, took to an airplane to scan farm fields. She saw a pile of what she said was uncovered chicken manure. The pile was actually biosolids from Ocean City. Phillips did not return an email seeking comment for this story.

The Hudson family is now being sued under the Clean Water Act, under accusations they allowed wastewater to pollute a local stream.

Still, even before the Hudson Farm lawsuit was filed in 2010, Clayville said the issue of biosolids has been building.

“This has been coming for a while, and it’s really going to get to be an issue,” Clayville said. “ I’ve gotten more calls the last two years from folks on biosolid issues than I did the previous 10 years before that as a consultant.”

Jim Parsons, Ocean City’s deputy public works director, said some farmers have told him they don’t want the regulatory strings that come with using free sludge.

“It comes [to] a point at which they say, ‘OK, even though I love the stuff and it’s great as fertilizer, the scales have tipped, and I just don’t want to fool with it,'” he said.

Influent processed by Ocean City’s sewer plant ends up as what is essentially fertilizer, referred to as a Class A biosolid. The heat-pasteurized and lime-treated biosolid had been shipped to a handful of area farms, where farmers spread the material as they would any other fertilizer.

The biosolids are treated at the plant to reach a pH level of 11.5 before being heated to 158 degrees to destroy pathogens, Parsons said.

He said each load is sampled to meet requirements of the Maryland Department of the Environment. The end result is something as safe as a bag of fertilizer you’d find at a hardware store, Parsons said.

But today, there are so few takers that the resort is sending all its biosolids — for now — to the Worcester County landfill.

Some farmers are just too plain spooked to touch the stuff in the wake of the Hudson Farm lawsuit.

Another theory is that farmers are simply waiting for the state’s latest restrictions on sludge to get more stringent.

At least one 20-ton truckload goes to the dump every day in peak season. With a tipping fee of $70 per ton, it costs the town about $1,400 per run.

For fiscal 2010, Ocean City budgeted $39,192 for landfill dumping of biosolids, but at this time, it was mostly for “off-spec” fertilizer, or biosolids that didn’t quite measure up after being processed.

For 2011, that figure was about $80,000. In 2012, it jumped to about $112,000.

For fiscal 2013, the town will spend at least $225,000 to send biosolids to the dump when it used to cost it almost nothing.

Ocean City generates about 6,600 tons of biosolids a year. If it had to take every last bit to the dump, which is a worst-case scenario, that would cost the resort about $500,000.

According to the Maryland Department of the Environment, sewage sludge “returns essential nutrients to the soil, adds organic matter, and can improve the tillability and moisture retention capability of the soil.” Anyone who wants to apply the biosolids to their land in Maryland must obtain a permit.

“Farmers, they have to plan way out — they need certainty,” Parsons said. “Anything that eliminates a headache, they’re probably going to try to do. As desirable as our material may be, it also may represent another headache.”