The Governor's Love Affair With Big Chicken and Big Development

Governor Martin O'Malley claims he's all about helping to protect and improve the Chesapeake Bay.  He wrote, in The Daily Times, on April 3, 2010:

"We cannot afford to exchange our family-owned farms in Maryland for massive housing development projects. It wouldn't be good for the Chesapeake Bay or for our economy. It would be damaging to our agricultural community and to our state's future."
But let’s see – its ok to

• exchange our family farms for huge factory CAFO’s instead

• put the family farm under contract with corporations like integrator Perdue, causing the family to mortgage the family farm to the hilt in order to meet the chicken house specifications of the integrator's contract

• make the family farmer solely responsible for managing the waste that comes from the corporation’s product (a little trick that saves companies like Perdue millions of dollars each year, and let's them claim to be such generous souls they'll give this priceless commodity to the farmer for free so he can use it as a free fertilizer- which actually works up to the point that too much of it is produced and too much of it goes on our farmlands to wash into our waterways.)

• continue subsidy programs that benefit the corporate integrator and leave the small, independent farmer out of the money stream

• put roadblocks in the way of organic farming, farm co-ops, and local small scale processing plants

And while telling us how farming is better than development on the Eastern Shore, our Governor did NOTHING to prevent legislatve Emergency Regulations this session from rolling back Bay protections in the 2007 Stormwater Management Act by allowing nearly 1500 new developments to be built in Maryland in the next 3 years that will be grandfathered in under the old stormwater regulations, which are FAR LESS protective of the Chesapeake Bay.

so which is it, Gov?