Saltwater from rising sea levels threatens future of farming along Chesapeake Bay - PBS NewsHour

Near the Chesapeake Bay, farms have flourished for hundreds of years on the rich, fertile soil of coastal Maryland. But as sea levels rise, driven in part by climate change, encroaching saltwater is disrupting the livelihoods of many farmers. It's a preview of what other areas near saltwater may soon confront. William Brangham reports for our series on climate change and water, Tipping Point.

Kevin Anderson, Somerset County, Maryland, Farmer: When I bought this farm, this field was perfect. Now the tide comes in and out of here all the time. And this area that we're standing here now, in the last 90 days, I would tell you it's had water on it at least half the time.

William Brangham: This cornfield is nestled near a creek connected to the Chesapeake Bay, and, a decade ago, he says that saltwater mostly stayed in the creek. But now it's increasingly coming onshore, making some of his land completely unfarmable
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Kevin Anderson: There's an acre of corn right here that cost $650 an acre to grow that I won't make a dime off of, because nothing productive will come from that.

William Brangham: About 30 miles away, a group of researchers who study sea level rise and saltwater intrusion, as this phenomenon is known, are trying to help farmers find solutions for what could be a potentially existential threat from all that saltwater. The University of Maryland's Kate Tully is one of the conference organizers. She studies the connections between agriculture and ecology.

The Delmarva Peninsula, bordered by the Atlantic to the east and the Chesapeake Bay to the west, is experiencing sea level rise at three times the global average. That's driven by climate change, but the land here is also slowly sinking. As a result, low-lying farmland is being lost at an alarming rate, as saltwater continues to flow onto the land from storms and higher tides, and below the land as saltwater keeps infiltrating the groundwater.

In a study published last year, Tully and her colleagues showed how visible salt patches on land almost doubled from 2011 to 2017 and about 20,000 farmable acres were transformed into marsh.

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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/saltwater-from-rising-sea-levels-threatens-future-of-farming-along-chesapeake-bay