A fisherman, a farmer and the fight over a fouled Maryland stream

One late summer afternoon last year, Chris Thomas watched an all-too-familiar sight: A wall of gray sludge washed down the creek outside his home, rendering the water nearly opaque and leaving hundreds of dead fish in its wake. It had a stench that would “knock you right down,” he said.

Thomas, who grew up along this creek and raised his son to fish in it, has seen this mysterious liquid run by his house repeatedly for seven years, but no incident was as bad as the one he discovered that Labor Day weekend.

“This is the worst environmental thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “I haven’t even seen something like this on television.”

For Thomas, the fouling of a northeast Maryland tributary called Basin Run is a tragedy. It didn’t take him long to trace the problem to a neighbor just upstream, a dairy operation with hundreds of cows called Kilby Farms.

This spring, the Maryland Department of the Environment sued Kilby Farms and an associated real estate company, Hartland Holdings. Officials say the businesses, both owned by the Pennsylvania farmer Ben Flahart, failed to comply with an August 2025 settlement over releases of foul liquid into Basin Run.

Flahart’s attorney Anthony Gorski said in an interview that he hasn’t seen proof that the incidents in Basin Run were caused by Kilby Farms. He argued that many issues on the property date back decades but have only attracted scrutiny since Flahart took over.

In June, a judge ordered Kilby Farms to stop discharges into Basin Run, and MDE has since asked the court to hold the operation in civil contempt over continued violations — even threatening to seek jail time if Flahart doesn’t comply. The two sides are scheduled to discuss the contempt motion Monday in a Cecil County courtroom.

The state’s lawsuit against Kilby Farms represents an unusual escalation in one of Maryland’s longest-simmering environmental battles: Agriculture is the biggest and most stubborn driver of pollution in state waterways, but regulators rarely take farmers to court. Officials generally treat farm pollution as a cost of producing food — a problem to be minimized, not erased.

In the case of Flahart and his businesses, though, court filings and state inspection reports paint a picture of an environmental scofflaw.

An MDE spokesperson declined to comment, but the agency alleged in a May complaint that Kilby Farms had violated its agreement with the state “on a nearly continual basis” since last summer, with discharges into Basin Run growing worse after the settlement. The fish kill that Thomas described came only weeks after Kilby Farms entered its deal with the state.

And regulators say Kilby Farms doesn’t even have a permit to operate the dairy. Attorneys representing MDE have asked the Cecil County Circuit Court to assess fines of up to $10,000 for each day the violations occurred.

Flahart took over the Maryland dairy operation in 2017 from the Kilby family, who farmed cows and ran a popular ice cream shop there, and he said in an interview that he was denied permit coverage by MDE despite renewals under the prior owners.

The Pennsylvanian estimated that he’s invested $5 million into improved operations and environmental compliance on the Kilby property, including measures to capture runoff from corn feed. In a June filing, Gorski said his clients “vehemently deny” that discharges have gotten worse since the state settlement.

To Flahart, it looks like he’s been targeted by what he called a “nutjob” Democratic administration, referring to Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat who took office in January 2023 after eight years of Republican rule.

“I’m just trying to farm,” Flahart said.

Dead fish, a ‘god-awful’ color

Basin Run flows west for 6 miles through Cecil County before eventually emptying into the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay. Neighbors and state inspection reports describe a sickened waterway.

Larry McCracken, a neighbor downstream from the 260-acre Kilby Farms property, was checking deer-hunting cameras late last August when he discovered the creek had turned a blue-green, “god-awful” color and brimmed with at least 500 dead fish, from minnows to rainbow trout to largemouth bass.

McCracken’s family has farmed along Basin Run for generations, and he said he learned from his grandfather how to manage cattle while striving to protect the environment.

“I grew up on this creek,” said McCracken, 36. “It taught me a lot.”

He had hoped to teach his own kids to fish Basin Run but said that because of the pollution, he hasn’t had the chance.

MDE inspectors responded to the scene a day after McCracken’s discovery, by which time Thomas said sediment had settled over many of the fish. An inspector eventually tallied around 200 dead fish.

For Thomas, 42, these releases have ruined a lifelong refuge. Basin Run winds through deep woods and steep gullies on the Susquehanna’s north side, territory that felt like a kingdom for Thomas as a boy.

When Thomas was growing up, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources stocked Basin Run with trout. He got to know the natural resources staff and even lent a hand, helping to weigh and measure fish. Before long, a thriving and self-sustaining wild trout population took root.

Decades later, he and his wife bought 15 acres from his dad, next door to his childhood home. The couple built a log cabin and have raised their son, Easton, on Basin Run’s waters. Now 12, Easton loves hunting for antlers and arrowheads, but, more than anything, he loves to fish.

Like his father, Easton speaks wistfully of a time when the stream still teemed with life — trout, shad, catfish and giant salamanders. He used to spend practically all summer in the creek, sometimes catching five fish a day.

“Oh, I love fishing that stream,” Easton said.

In court documents and hundreds of pages of inspection reports, state regulators allege a laundry list of violations at Kilby Farms, including substantial expansions to the unpermitted farm’s herd and improper disposal of dead cattle. Large animal operations like dairy farms require approvals under Maryland law to regulate and prevent discharges.

According to the complaint, a drainage pond Flahart had been warned could fail seems to have driven much of the issue in Basin Run, releasing what state inspection reports describe as a gray, “foul”-smelling and sometimes foamy mixture. The complaint also points to a PVC pipe discharging manure into Basin Run and notes other discharges of fermented cow feed, milk and other “unknown” contaminants.

Whatever the concoction, it is apparently potent. A Cecil County hazardous materials responder was so overwhelmed by the smell upon arriving at the scene of a spill in late December 2024 that he became “physically sick,” according to an inspection report from the incident.

Downstream from Kilby Farms, state testing has found diminished life and “severe” water-quality degradation.

Gorski, Flahart’s attorney, took issue with these testing methods. He said the state failed to account for pollution that flows through the farm and into Basin Run from a different tributary, which his own testing shows has high bacteria levels upstream from Kilby.

Flahart has already paid a $50,000 penalty to the state under last year’s settlement and undertaken costly work to remove the drainage pond blamed for much of the pollution, the attorney said.

A familiar name

A resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, just over the state line, Flahart farms around 2,000 acres in Northern Maryland and on the Eastern Shore, where he’s a familiar name to some residents and county officials.

In Caroline County, the storage of foul-smelling animal sludge on a Hartland Holdings property became so unpopular among neighbors that local leaders imposed a moratorium in 2024, and Flahart and the county took each other to court.

When a potent stench wafted from one of his Cecil County properties in 2022, residents reported that it clung to their clothes. One man told the Cecil Whig that he’d burned through three cans of air freshener fighting the smell.

Flahart said regulators don’t understand many of their own rules — like for reporting herd sizes and disposal of cow carcasses — and have imposed impossible constraints on his industry.

“We’re talking about cow s--- here, not radioactive material,” he said.

Scores of farms around the state have far worse problems than Kilby, Flahart said, but judging by MDE’s standards for him, “every dairy farm in the state of Maryland should be shut down.”

Downstream, Thomas occasionally hears from other fishermen who wonder what’s happened to all the trout in Basin Run.

“Aw, man,” he says in response, “I don’t have time to tell you the whole story.”