The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an organization aimed at cleaning up the polluted waterway, has done too little to stem pollution by farmers, environmental advocates tell The Baltimore Sun.

About 10 years ago, the foundation decided to work with crop and poultry farmers in the region in hopes of mitigating the effects of agriculture on the Chesapeake Bay.

Farm pollution is the largest polluter of the watershed, and the group has raised millions of dollars for anti-pollution efforts, most recently helping to secure $400-million in cleanup money through the federal farm bill.

Yet the bay remains severely polluted; last year, farm runoff carried 290 million pounds of nitrogen into the bay, much more than the federal goal of 184 million pounds.

“The bay overall is a disaster, and the leading cause of that disaster is agriculture,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a former Maryland state senator. “You couple this with the position of the 500-pound gorilla in the environmental field of the bay, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, taking a hands-off approach to agriculture … and you have a disaster in environmental leadership, too.”

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for its part, says that overly tough regulations cause farmers to sell their land to developers and that the runoff from large subdivisions would be much worse for the bay overall.

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