When we fly at the East Coast Championships over the Maryland
farm lands

We love flying over the Maryland and Delaware farm lands on the
DelMarVa peninsula. We find open farm fields some with just bare earth, some
with newly planted crops. We also see plenty of chicken coops and often use them
as visual sources of lift.

You would think with so much open farm lands needing fertilizer there would be
plenty of opportunities to safely use the results of all this industrial
farming. Apparently not.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/18/3722590/maryland-chicken-manure-clean-energy/

In Maryland, agriculture is big business — with around 350,000
people employed in some aspect of agriculture, it’s the largest commercial
industry in the state. And within Maryland agriculture, poultry production —
especially chickens raised for meat — reigns supreme, accounting for $990
million in production value in 2013, or 40 percent of Maryland’s total cash farm
income. Perdue, the country’s third-largest producer of broiler chickens, is
based out of Salisbury, Maryland, on the Delmarva Peninsula, where some 1,700
chicken farms are located.

Such large-scale poultry production, however, leaves Maryland with around 650
million pounds of chicken manure each year. Some farmers use that leftover
manure — which is especially high in phosphorus, an important nutrient for plant
growth — on their fields. But some manure — leftover from chicken producing
operations or over-saturated fields — makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay,
where it stimulates the growth of algae and creates areas of low oxygen known as
“dead zones.” According to a 2012 report by the Chesapeake Bay Commission, 15
percent of the nitrogen and 36 percent of the phosphorus in the Chesapeake Bay
comes from manure.