FREELAND, Md. — Her roots date back four generations on this land.
“So we’re currently on a 100-acre farm that originally belonged to my great grandparents.”
But Joanne Frederick’s best chance of safeguarding this land for generations to come lies in its walnut trees.
“You can make this beautiful Italian liquor with black walnuts. It’s called ‘nocino’, said Frederick as she displayed a bottle of the finished product.
Despite forest conservation and land preservation easements, which span virtually the entire property, the proposed Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project would cut right through it with its five hundred thousand volt transmission line.
“The project will take… runs a diagonal line, bisects the farm and takes about five acres almost entirely forest… old growth forest will be destroyed here,” said Frederick.
The Maryland Farm Bureau has already announced its opposition to the 70-mile-long project, and now, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has released an analysis, which claims it would threaten more than 500 acres of protected land.
To those who would be directly impacted by the transmission lines, the foundation weighing in is critical.
After all, the farmers and land owners now have found a powerful ally in the environmentalists.
Frederick, who now heads up an opposition group called ‘Stop MPRP’, says Maryland has never put a price on protecting the bay, and it won’t start now.
“Yes, the company out of New Jersey, PSEG, is a $40 billion market cap company. They have a lot of money, but we have a lot of grit and determination here,” said Frederick, “The fact that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation came out and said, ‘Listen, this will be a significant, negative impact to our environment is huge.”
