It’s good to see a big Midwest “land grant” agricultural program that’s concerned about the Gulf Dead Zone, and upper Midwest farms’ large contribution to it. But this release about a study underway at Iowa State University aiming to reduce nitrogen entering the Mississippi River from farm fields falls flat when you realize it’s just a technical fix for the status quo of over-fertilized conventional commodity crops.
Half of the nitrogen that makes it to the Gulf is from commercial fertilizer, and 15 percent is from livestock manure. The rest comes from wastewater treatment plants, industry, and rainfall, according to the U.S. Geological Society.
As much as 39 percent of the nitrogen buildup in the Gulf has been traced back to the Upper Mississippi River Basin, including Iowa.
So what is a bioreactor and how can it help? From the Iowa state page:
A bioreactor is a large trench through which water from underground drainage tiles passes before leaving the field. This hole or trench is filled with organic matter that is high in carbon, in this case a mix of chips from various hardwoods, that act as a strainer for water coming from the tile. The wood chips “strain-off” nitrogen (appearing as nitrates) in the water by growing bacteria that digest the nitrates before the water flows out of the field and into nearby streams
While the pilot bioreactors are only about 12 square feet in surface area, full-scale bioreactors require about 25 square feet per acre of farmland drained and a depth of about four feet depending on the location of the tile line. A 100-acre field would require about 2,500 square feet of bioreactor space covered by a grass buffer.
Sounds expensive! And, uh, like a lot of digging. Add in all the plastic “tile” tubing that’s buried in the fields to drain the fertilizer (and all attendant pesticides one would assume) off quickly and into watercourses, now it’s sounding pretty wasteful. And toxic.
Organic methods of reducing such runoff would necessitate a whole different system that would by default radically limit nitrogen and pesticide pollution of the rivers, and would institute weed management techniques like crop rotation and cultivation that could be the region’s only defense against herbicide resistant GMO superweeds which are well established in the South and marching northwards.
So how about putting more funds, effort, and multi-year studies toward getting conventional farmers off of chemicals altogether, instead of building enough trenches to hide an army?
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Comments
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chrisbrandow Posted 9:51 am
06 Oct 2009
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Erik Hoffner Posted 12:10 pm
06 Oct 2009
Of course, anything would be an improvement over the status quo.
Erik, Orion Grassroots Network
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chrisbrandow Posted 3:26 pm
06 Oct 2009
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Susan Heathcote Posted 9:40 am
09 Oct 2009
To learn more about the impact of nutrient pollution You should check out an interesting report from the EPA Office of Water Science entitled “An Urgent Call to Action: Report of the State-EPA Nutrient Innovations Task Group”. This report discusses the worsening trend of nutrient pollution nationally, which is projected to continue to get worse unless significant changes are made to reduce both agricultural and urban sources of nutrient pollution. A link to the full report is at http://www.epa.gov/waterscience.
This is a surprisingly strong report with bold recommendations. It is good to see EPA scientists unmuzzled, but it is going to take significant pressure from the public to get the current policies changed, especially in regard to control of agricultural pollution sources.
On page 20-21 of the report (table 2), the Task Group identifies new tools that would help reduce nutrient pollution. The top 5 tools judged as potentially the most effective for reducing sources of nutrient pollution are:
1. Detergent phosphate ban
2. Nonpoint source regulation
3. Federally required state water quality standards with numeric nutrient water quality criteria
4. Update/add nutrient secondary treatment requirements for point source discharge permits
5. Green labeling – to encourage consumers to support sustainable agriculture and business practices
In the “Call to action” section on page 34 of the report states,
“Continuing the status quo, on the other hand, will ensure increasingly degraded ecosystems, lost aquatic habitat and species diversity, abandonment of water quality standards in vulnerable watersheds, increased drinking water risks, and the greater future costs associated with lost economic opportunity, vanishing recreational resources, and increased treatment, recovery and restoration."
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Erik Hoffner Posted 10:45 am
09 Oct 2009
Speaking of dead zones, this LA Times article today notes 400 other dead zones around the world.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oregon-ocean9-2009oct09,0,4615320.story?track=rss
Yikes.
Erik, Orion Grassroots Network
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Erik Hoffner Posted 6:33 am
22 Oct 2009
Now that's a tech fix simple enough for me to support. Pollan says that guvvy should support it, too, with subsidy.
Erik
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