4 ms·

> poisoning waterways This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.

by ch4s3 5y ago

tastyfreeze 5y ago
Source please. The quantity of fertilizer used on farms dwarfs that used on lawns.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  The knowledge and professionalism and price sensitivity of the farmer dwarfs that of thr average home owner. How many nights of sleep does the average home owner lose each year obsessing over the amount of fertilizer and cost of that fertilizer? Meanwhile that actually happens to most farmers. They obsess and endlessly talk about how to cut their fertilizer and pesticides to the bare minimum they think they can handle so they can maybe own their farms for the next generation. You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer? These guys walk their fields once a week and some once a day. They notice things like soil and fertilizer runoff.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    > You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer? They need to overapply fertilizers because by now that's the only way anything grows in most places after decades of soil mismanagement, due to a wide-spread disregard of sustainable practices in favor of "fast results, fast money" over-fertilizing [0]. Rotating crops to keep the soil fertile sounds nice in theory, in capitalistic practice it's not popular because demand for different crops is not interchangeable, so rotating crops means industrial scale operations miss out on valuable growing months, labor and resources, growing a product that's not as profitable. The "fix" is to just keep applying fertilizers to keep growing those high demand crops because industrial scale operations also think like corporations; It's all about the financial returns in the short-term, not about long-term sustainability. [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.h...
freeflight 5y ago
This is still very much true according to NOAA [0] A bit weird to make such a definitive statement about the, allegedly singular, culprit with "lawn runoff". It's really difficult, to nearly impossible, to trace back where the nitrogen and phosphorus originated from that results in oceanic dead zones thousands of miles away [1]. A good start would simply be to look at the biggest consumers of these fertilizers, and those ain't homeowners fertilizing lawns, those are industrial scale agricultural operations [2] for whom fertilizer use directly correlates with their financial bottom line [3]. [0] https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4216153/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4216153/ [2] https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-management-and-fertilizer#NutrientPollution https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-managem... [3] https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/11/30/excess-fertilizer-washed-from-midwestern-fields-is-slowly-poisoning-the-gulf-of-mexico/ https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/11/30/excess-fertilizer-...
- ch4s3 5y ago
  I went back and revisited what I read and realized I was overstating the case on gains in fertilization efficiency. It's unfortunately too late to edit my original comment.

> poisoning waterways This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.

by ch4s3 5y ago

> poisoning waterways This hasn't been true for years. Most algal blooms around the US at least are caused by lawn runoff.

tastyfreeze 5y ago

Source please. The quantity of fertilizer used on farms dwarfs that used on lawns.

ldiracdelta 5y ago
The knowledge and professionalism and price sensitivity of the farmer dwarfs that of thr average home owner. How many nights of sleep does the average home owner lose each year obsessing over the amount of fertilizer and cost of that fertilizer? Meanwhile that actually happens to most farmers. They obsess and endlessly talk about how to cut their fertilizer and pesticides to the bare minimum they think they can handle so they can maybe own their farms for the next generation. You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer? These guys walk their fields once a week and some once a day. They notice things like soil and fertilizer runoff.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > You think they're throwing away product by over applying fertilizer? They need to overapply fertilizers because by now that's the only way anything grows in most places after decades of soil mismanagement, due to a wide-spread disregard of sustainable practices in favor of "fast results, fast money" over-fertilizing [0]. Rotating crops to keep the soil fertile sounds nice in theory, in capitalistic practice it's not popular because demand for different crops is not interchangeable, so rotating crops means industrial scale operations miss out on valuable growing months, labor and resources, growing a product that's not as profitable. The "fix" is to just keep applying fertilizers to keep growing those high demand crops because industrial scale operations also think like corporations; It's all about the financial returns in the short-term, not about long-term sustainability. [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210112125215.h...

freeflight 5y ago

This is still very much true according to NOAA [0] A bit weird to make such a definitive statement about the, allegedly singular, culprit with "lawn runoff". It's really difficult, to nearly impossible, to trace back where the nitrogen and phosphorus originated from that results in oceanic dead zones thousands of miles away [1]. A good start would simply be to look at the biggest consumers of these fertilizers, and those ain't homeowners fertilizing lawns, those are industrial scale agricultural operations [2] for whom fertilizer use directly correlates with their financial bottom line [3]. [0] https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4216153/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4216153/ [2] https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-management-and-fertilizer#NutrientPollution https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-nutrient-managem... [3] https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/11/30/excess-fertilizer-washed-from-midwestern-fields-is-slowly-poisoning-the-gulf-of-mexico/ https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/11/30/excess-fertilizer-...

ch4s3 5y ago
I went back and revisited what I read and realized I was overstating the case on gains in fertilization efficiency. It's unfortunately too late to edit my original comment.