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Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes
- phkahler 6y agoWhile agricultural practices may be to blame, most of the farms in the region are smaller that the ones out west. You won't find 40,000 acre cattle ranches for example.
- briefcomment 6y ago> The Great Lakes are surrounded by 28 million acres of soybean, corn and hay fields. Most of those fields are managed using intensive mono-cropping methods, which means a single crop, grown in rows for miles on end. It sounds like it's the type of crop raised and method of cultivation used that's more relevant than the size of the farm. I think if people paid more attention to what they eat, and then paid attention to what food their meat ate, we would see way less soybean and corn production. Soybean oil sneakily makes it way into a ton of food, but you can actively avoid it. It's not particularly healthy. Emphasizing free range chicken, and grass fed beef would probably decrease soybean and corn demand as well.
- ahelwer 6y agoEmphasizing tofu would also decrease soybean demand, despite being made of soybeans. For those who find tofu unappetizing - look up dry-fried tofu. Tofu doesn't have to be consumed as a tasteless spongy cube!
- xxpor 6y agoSoybeans aren't a product, they're a platform. They're a almost completely fungible source of protein. Corn is the same thing for carbs. They're in everything. It's likely been years since you had a meal without any corn or soybean derived ingredients.
- alacombe 6y ago> They're in everything. It's likely been years since you had a meal without any corn or soybean derived ingredients. Not here, just had some lamb legs from an animal I raised/shot/processed myself.
- halfjoking 6y agoThis is why I never eat at restaurants and cook 100% of my meals since the pandemic started. WFH has finally given me the ability to eat healthy. All meat I buy is pasture-raised corn/soy free (animals never fed it), shipped frozen since you can’t buy that in stores. I’ve followed a “low-lectin” diet for a couple years but it was pretty impossible to not cheat pre-pandemic. Now my main starches are cassava flour and sweet potatoes. Fuck corn/soy.
- xxpor 6y agoI guarantee the animals were fed vitamins that were derived from corn.
- bpodgursky 6y ago40,000 acre cattle ranches don't use fertilizer.
- jdavis703 6y agoBut the cattle likely eat plants farmed with fertilizer.
- artificialLimbs 6y agoThis is often done at the 'finishing' level (I forget what it's technically called, if it is...), even if the cattle are pasture raised for the dominant portion of their lives. You should see these places. Horrific shitholes, literally; cows stand knee deep in their own excrement and I believe they're fed dominantly corn to fatten them up for a few weeks before going off to freezer camp. These kinds of places are on public display on Texas highways and interstates. Even if the ranches where they're raised are 40,000 acres, the places they go before they hit your table may be a whole new world.
- ggm 6y agobut cattle finishing yards generate huge amounts of nitrogenous liquid waste.
- phkahler 6y agoI guess my point is that they're mostly smaller, family owned farms. That means the giant scale stuff could still come along and make things worse.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- darig 6y agoWait until returntonow.net learns about zebra muscles. Surely the dead-zones can only have a single cause, right?
- mjevans 6y agoHow much fertilizer is runoff from lawns? I think we'd all be a lot better off without every suburban home having a lawn, or at the very least going low or virtually no chemical and letting natural water alone suffice.
- peteradio 6y agoVery little, although I do agree with the sentiment.
- bratcomplex 6y agosome quick searching, it’s looking maybe not so little https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-and-around-home https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-...
- sjg007 6y agoWe banned phosphates in laundry and dishwasher powder. That was the largest source.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe latter really. Lawns themselves are perfectly fine - if you need some drainage and soil retention assistance. It need not be the crazed monoculture but it can serve a function if you treat it as such. Going xeroscaped in areas with significant rain is a good way to lose your soil to run-off.
- mckinney 6y agoAnother ridiculously ironic consequence of environmentalism. But do keep the "renewable" energy train running at all costs.
- raunak 6y agoCould you elaborate? I might be missing something, but what does this have to do with environmentalism at all?
- mckinney 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol
- raunak 6y agoWhile I understand your point, the article mentions soybean, corn, and hay as the culprit crops. Beyond that, don’t you think your parent comment is a little misguided? How is corn ethanol what environmentalists tout as “renewable energy”?
- mckinney 6y agoI suggest you do a bit of reading if you truly don't understand that corn ethanol is widely considered a "renewable fuel."
- Ardon 6y agoCorn ethanol is widely considered a 'renewable fuel' by those invested in the oil industry, since it allows them to keep more of their accumulated capital. It's much less common amongst people who are attempting to improve the outcome of climate change, the people you seem to be tarring with this brush.
- mckinney 6y ago
- mrfusion 6y agoI thought the zebra mussels were doing a good job cleaning the water?
- redtexture 6y agoThey clog all pipes taking water from the Great Lakes, to the tune of millions, tens of millions of dollars a year, and reduce the potential of other filter feeders, native to North America, some of whom are fish.
- ErikVandeWater 6y agoI wonder what it would take to harvest Zebra mussels for something like cat food (I imagine they don't taste great). I think the shells are valuable in some respect as well. I wish there were more innovation prizes for things where there is a potential market opportunity and big positive externalities.
- giantg2 6y agoConsidering the cost for any aquatic foods, I doubt they would be cheaper than the current waste products that animal food is made from.
- katbyte 6y agoedible, but since they are so efficient at filtering water, they tend to accumulate pollutants and toxins
- paulcole 6y agoIsn’t the potential market opportunity and big positive externalities the innovation prize? If you figure out how to turn zebra mussels into cat food, you’ll be rich. Or you won’t and there was no potential marketing opportunity and the positive externalities weren’t that big.
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
- dukeofdoom 6y agoIronically, Zebra mussels helped to filter out the lakes. So much for the experts, and alarmists. How do I know? I live on the Great Lakes. Water sometimes in the summer looks Caribbean Blue. Its the clearest in decades. While I agree that more should be done to control the outflow from farms. I propose ending soy bean farms. This would have the added benefit of starving leftist journalists. Especially ones that regurgitate all the cliche talking points.
- Ardon 6y agoI'm kind of in awe at this comment. Not for good reasons, but still. In case anyone is wondering, no, zebra mussels are still bad. No one was claiming they wouldn't filter water, a feature of all mussels. "So much for the experts, and alarmists." lol I believe this is what Ian Danskin coined a "Shrodinger's Douchebag", someone who says dumb and harmful things, then decides if he was joking or not based on reaction.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoDude, I lived through a decade of the "acid rain", and "hole in the ozone" is going to kill us all. I've come to realize that these people are not journalists. They are activists. There's as much science to their claims, as there are genders in the sky.
- jacobolus 6y agoOzone depletion was a very serious problem, so in the late 80s there was an international agreement to ban CFCs, halons, and other ozone-depleting chemicals. It is by no means fixed yet, but now ozone is heading back towards its previous levels, and should be recovered by around 2075. This is a great example of activism working to solve a serious global problem via public policy changes. You can read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
- ggm 6y agoThere are techniques to containing runoff. They involve structural work, and they go to soil erosion, and other problems. They might be jobs-positive, which is helpful in the current economic times. There is a similar problem close to the Great Barrier Reef, with the externality (for sugarcane farmers) of their runoff and the sensitivity of coral reefs to nutrient levels and turbidity. I am unsure Eutrophic water at this scale can be remediated by mechanical means (as in, dealing with oxygenation issues in the lakes, not preventing runoff from reaching the lakes)
- jeffmcmahan 6y agoI'm deeply blessed to live on and own ~100ft of Lake Erie's shoreline. I can hear her waves now. Like all the Great Lakes, she is an inland ocean, enormous, inviting the misapprehension that she will dilute an infinite amount of anything you could drain into her. Alas, around here we know the history: not that long ago the surface of Lake Erie caught on fire and no one could figure out how to put it out. So let's remember that we're doing better than we once did. My backyard is daily frequented by bald eagles chasing one another. The place is in many ways healthy. At the same time, it's quite clear that it's still not good enough - particularly the algae blooms centering on the mouth of the Maumee river (near Toledo) which turn miles of the lake into something looking and feeling like bright green paint every so often. It doesn't come near my place, but you can imagine how I feel when I picture a hundred square miles of toxic green sludge, juxtaposed with Michigan and Ohio Republican politicians proposing "self-regulation" as the solution...
- thisisnico 6y agoI live quite close to you, fellow Ontarian here. Windsor is where I call home. I plan one day to own a house on the lake, nothing else like it.
- jeffmcmahan 6y agoI'm a Michigander - across the water from Amherstburg and a tick south.
- tjr225 6y agoI come from Kalamazoo. I hope I never have to move back. Cheap, but for a reason.
- jeffmcmahan 6y agoUh, is that intended as a shot at Michigan? Maybe that's not what you meant. I don't know. When I sit on my break wall with friends, sipping scotch and enjoying a half decent cigar, I get to feeling like certain parts of Michigan are pretty hard to improve upon.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoWe really need to come to grips with doing planning and policy of the developed world with an eye to how it impacts the environment and we really need to worry more about what we are doing to our waters. If we don't, we may well hit catastrophic failure that solves the problem for us and not in a good way. The pandemic could be just an initial down payment on disasters that will help cut things back to a more sustainable population level. I suspect that would be, overall, a bad thing. Better to get there by solving such problems elegantly than to get there via catastrophic systemic failure.
- duxup 6y agoI always wanted to pump water from the pond next to my house that collects and holds water from the storm drains figuring if fertilizer runoff is a problem my lawn would be happy to absorb some of it. Not sure if that is scientifically sound or not....
- scrose 6y agoA lot of storm drains also include raw sewage, so you might want to take a pass on that!
- duxup 6y agoThis is a pretty recent suburban environment so I don't expect that, our pond seems sewage free ;)
- SECProto 6y agoBrake dust and road surface oils might not be so fun to pump on your lawn though.
- 67868018 6y agoThe last paragraph has a train wreck of two ideas smashed into one sentence and nobody has commented on this. Makes you wonder who reads the articles and who skims the articles.
- spurgu 6y agoBy paragraph you mean sentence? > The question is whether we can turn convince the owners of mega-farms to the Titanic around fast enough. There's just once misplaced word there, move "turn" six steps to the right and it's a complete valid sentence. Most likely a copy/paste formatting/refactoring mistake.
- spurgu 6y agoAhmm, you might mean the one before that: > The solution? Many ecologists agree the answer is small-scale, organic, bio-dynamic farming that includes methods that regenerate the soil instead of destroying it, such as composting, not tilling the soil, using cover crops, planting and diversity of crops and rotating them. Not tilling the soil? What does that even mean? Using cover crops? As a layman using cover crops seems like a good idea.
- zizee 6y ago> Not tilling the soil? What does that even mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming
- robbiep 6y agoNo Till agriculture is exactly what it sounds like - not ploughing it up at the end of a growing season. This has a number of benefits including retaining soil structure and root structure, enhancing and retaining moisture profiles (since adopting this in the mid 90s on my parents farm in Australia we’ve been able to grow crops in drought years that would have otherwise been unviable) however it also comes with other requirements - for example prior to no-till ploughing was important to remove weeds and other unwanted field growth, this is usually accomplished by spraying including long term residual sprays which have lots of potentially dubious effects on the environment
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rmason 6y agoHe's got it mostly all wrong. Fertilizer isn't the major contributor it's livestock manure from large farms. If you aren't aware crop farming is a very low margin business. Fertilizer costs real money so if you over fertilize you're likely to lose money. It's changing slowly but large livestock operations used to spread manure where it was convenient, not where the extra fertilizer was needed. Now they're required to file plans, complete with soil tests to show they're putting the manure where it's less likely to be a problem. When I left the fertilizer business over twenty years ago we were helping the large livestock farms begin composting. If you rid the manure of it's largest component which is water then hauling a load to a distant field is way more possible. Hard for some to believe but people who sold fertilizer were encouraging there customers to use less! Imagine a car dealer telling you not to buy an additional car. The government also had a program where they would pay farmers to plant grass strips along waterways with the idea the strips would intercept the nutrients from fertilizer or manure before they reached the water. However I believe funding for that program was cut which may be adding to the problem.
- robinsord 6y agoWow, so you’re a paid fertilizer schill. You do realize that when you strip away the absolutely catastrophic agricultural devastation we’ve created — glyphosate, pesticides, monocropping, soil erosion, CAFO — that cow manure is the absolute gold of compost and the absolute best fertilizer, right? You do realize that 30+ Million bison once roamed the US, grazing and pooping, which is why we had some of the most fertile and incredible soil on the planet? And then we fucked everything up and came in and poured our chemicals and artificial farming ideas all over the land and now it’s absolutely torched. And now everyone is beholden to this toxic CAFO and monocropping machine filled with chemicals and pesticides and runoff and disease and antibacterial agents and so much unholy madness that no one can even see the light of day, outside of a few regenerative farming advocates who are desperately trying to shake people into understanding how farming CAN AND SHOULD WORK based on the way the planet already figured out thousands of years ago for us. But sure buddy. Blame it all on ‘manure’.
- stefan_ 6y agoThis seems like a silly distinction. Where's all the feed from that fuels the manure? It's plain obvious this problem is caused by our greatly expanded production of fertilizer since the Haber-Bosch process.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/ds0Zz https://archive.is/ds0Zz