US Corn Boom Threatens Sea Life: Pesticide Runoff Continues To Pollute Gulf
JEFFERSON, Iowa - Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since the Depression. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price.
The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone” - a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs, and shrimp suffocate.
The dead zone was discovered in 1985 and has grown fairly steadily since then, forcing fishermen to venture farther and farther out to sea to find their catch. For decades, fertilizer has been considered the prime cause of the lifeless spot.
With demand for corn booming, some researchers fear the dead zone will expand rapidly, with devastating consequences.
“We might be coming close to a tipping point,” said Matt Rota, director of the water resources program for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group. “The ecosystem might change or collapse as opposed to being just impacted.”
Environmentalists had hoped to cut nitrogen runoff by encouraging farmers to apply less fertilizer and establish buffers along waterways. But the demand for the corn-based fuel additive ethanol has driven up the price for the crop, which is selling for about $4 per bushel, up from a little more than $2 in 2002.
That enticed American farmers - mostly in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota - to plant more than 93 million acres of corn in 2007, the most since 1933. They substituted corn for other crops, or made use of land not previously in cultivation.
Corn is more “leaky” than crops such as soybean and alfalfa - that is, it absorbs less nitrogen per acre. The prime reasons are the drainage systems used in cornfields and the timing of when the fertilizer is applied.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that up to 210 million pounds of nitrogen fertilizer enter the Gulf of Mexico each year. Scientists had no immediate estimate for 2007, but said they expect the amount of fertilizer going into streams to increase with more acres of corn planted.
Farmers realize the connection between their crop and problems downstream, but with the price of corn soaring, it doesn’t make sense to grow anything else. And growing corn isn’t profitable without nitrogen-based fertilizer.
The dead zone typically begins in the spring and persists into the summer. Its size and location vary each year because of currents, weather and other factors, but it is generally near the mouth of the Mississippi. Soil erosion, sewage, and industrial pollution contribute to the dead zone, but fertilizer is believed to be the chief factor.
Fertilizer causes explosive growth of algae, which then dies and sinks to the bottom, where it sucks up oxygen as it decays. This creates a deep layer of oxygen-depleted ocean where creatures either escape or die.
Given the market pressure to grow corn, the Natural Resources Defense Council and others say the nation needs a comprehensive, federal approach to the problem.
© 2007 The Boston Globe
I would hope that within a very few years ethanol production will be converted to a perennial crop that is less fertilizer intensive such as switchgrass. This article is a bit misleading when it states, “with the price of corn soaring, it doesn’t make sense to grow anything else.” I plant no corn-on-corn and feel soybeans are a good economic rotational choice. There are currently other good choices also. I apply 20% less N fertilizer now than I did a decade ago and have much better yields now (better genetics). All of my fertilizer is sliced into the ground with a coulter which provides minimal soil disturbance and reduces the chance for N loss. With our current high farm commodity prices these are good times for farmers the world over, both big and small. Of course with rising food prices the non-farming poor are in greater danger.
I PROMISE, I will post just this one post on this thread. I hope to keep it.
Our very existance, and that of your children’s and theirs, depends entirely upon the animaal and plant life in our oceans. We can discuss the problems of our society, our screwed up government, our pitiful Congress, Bush, Cheney, our coming depression, the war in Iraq, and one which may explode in Iran. We can worry and talk about our broken military and economy, the lack of jobs, outsourcing, DU, decaying infastructures, Paris Hilton etc.
The FACT remains, that the most serious problem facing ALL of mankind, is the ‘man made’ pollution of our oceans and atmosphere.
Those man made pollutions are killing the ocean’s microscopic plant life named ~~Phytoplankton~~
We have perhaps as little as five years left to reverse the damage, perhaps twenty. Please read this very brief link, and if any wish to argue the point, argue with the scientists who have spent their entire adult lives studying the subject.
http://www.whyplankton.com/
I’ll read the link if you keep your promise. Otherwise, why don’t we all just log onto the Kem Patrick website and skip Common Dreams altogether?
Whatever it takes to keep our cars, trucks and tanks rolling and jets screaming even if it means giving up fish.
MISANTHROPE
what’s the address for the k.p. website? and by golly i’ll eat it if it keeps me sexually active till i die.
EZEFLYER
it won’t only be fish we give up - it will be life as we know it…….
The title says pesticide runoff, but the article discusses fertilzer runoff. Maybe I’m just a little picky.
Guess where that nitrogen fertilizer comes from? Natural gas and nitrogen from the atmosphere. Guess what the byproduct is? Good old CO2!
No one knows how much fertilzer and fuel… is wasted on ethanol for fuel. It takes more fossil fuel energy to produce ethanol than it returns. That also means its production and use makes more CO2 than just burning the equivalent value of fossil fuel. Then there is the mess left over after the fermentation. It can be dried and used as a feed additive, but is anybody counting the wasted energy? A lot of the waste is fermentation byproduct and is pretty toxic.
Now this! “Pouring” synthetic fertilizer down the drain into the Gulf causing algal dead zones. Its totally uncontrolled “educated guessing”. Nitrogen is also linked to reef destruction in the Florida Keys.
How can the “suits” at ADM, Con Agra… sleep at night? They must be deluding themselves as well as the members of congress they have providing the subsidies that enable this disaster. If they are “laughing all the way to the bank”, its criminal. They have taken subsidy money for fraudulent purposes, and have risked an environmental disaster.
Time to create kelp farms in the gulf - they absorb CO2 and cool the water. They fix dead zones, and you can make ethanol from it (Finland makes great kelp Whiskey, and ethanol is just a fancy name for alcohol fuel).
Henry Ford only wanted Alcohol fuel to be used for his cars, and then Rockefeller got Prohibition passed to kill alcohol as a competitive fuel VS oil.
Ask yourself why else a hard drinking, all male congress would create prohibition.
Learn all you need to know at www.alcoholcanbeagas.com
Business will always privatize the profit and socialize the cost - if we allow it.
Corn to ethanol can be useful as a short-term, and I mean very short-term, way to build infrastructure and test technology; but ethanol from waste products is the only way to approach sustainability.
Any time polluters are allowed to pollute, they are, in effect, given a subsidy. So consider all of the subsidies most corn farmers receive: Their property taxes are subsidized, they use subsidized water, subsidized fuel, and subsidized inorganic fertilizers to produce corn for which they receive a direct subsidy, which the government then stores–at taxpayer expense–and which is shipped off to places like Mexico where it undercuts the local farmers who then flee north in an attempt to find jobs.
This is what is known in America as free-market capitalism.