This article doesn't mention it, but I've heard the suggestion that far more of the runoff is from over-fertilized suburban lawns than from agriculture.
At least commercial agriculture tends to be a bit more concerned about wasteful inputs, etc. (At least where subsidies haven't distorted it too much.)
But I see some incredibly excessively perfectly green lawns which are such a waste of resources unless you're playing golf or lawn bowling.
Glad to know I'm not alone. I live in a "wimbledon lawn" neighborhood in the NE US. Along with that comes vast caravans of clanking landscaping vehicles, a near constant drone of lawnmowers, leaf blowers, weed whackers, etc., and tiny yellow flags stuck into lawns with X marks covering pictograms of children and dogs.
The kicker: it's a lake community, where you're supposed to be able to swim and fish, and for the past two years the lake has been declared a biohazard* by late summer. Every month or so they treat the lake with some chemical cocktail that renders it "dangerous for swimming" for a week in an effort to fight the algae blooms.
Truly insane...I have to get out of here. And of course I'm an outcast for keeping my lawn all-natural. I do succumb to keeping it mowed so I'm not driven out of the neighborhood.
You might double check your source. Lawn fertilizer is a $5B industry, but it is usually priced at a dollar a pound, and a 50 lb bag might have 5-10 lb of N and 5-10 lb of P. USDA numbers for fertilizer use by crop are available, and based on those it looks to me like lawns account for less than 10% of the national fertilizer consumption. Corn uses 50%.
Lawns in general are goddamn stupid idea. The most common irrigated crop in the United States? Turf grass. They're a huge waste of water and a huge waste of fertilizer and both of those have very negative impacts on our immediate environment.
By definition, a well manicured lawn is wasteful. Lawns began as a way for nobility to signal that they could afford to take care of land, but not have it _produce_ anything.
I mow my lawn and I seed in the fall to keep erosion problems at bay, but that's about it. One of my neighbors has a putting-green like lawn with an in ground sprinkler system. It's amazing. It's the envy of the neighborhood, and it just makes me shake my head when I actually take the time to think about it.
Excuse me, but a huge portion of the US population lives in places that do not have water scarcity problems. I live in Iowa, we have more water than we know what to do with. Irrigating my lawn doesn't hurt the environment or any of my neighbors. Not everyone in the US lives in the southwest.
I bet you irrigate your lawn with potable water which takes energy to purify. So you're wasting clean water to maintain a furry green carpet (try some FieldTurf or native plants) that serves no purpose since it doesn't feed you (grow some vegetables) or act as that good of a carbon sink.
Some quick googling shows 45 million acres of turf of which 25 million are tended[1]. Compared to 408 million acres for crops[2]. Not definitive but it seems like agriculture is the bigger culprit. Though lawns are definitively stupid.
But an acre of farmland and an acre of suburban front-lawns are wildly different.
Agricultural chemicals are tightly regulated, various environmental groups watch them like a hawk and are quick to push for legislation against new chemicals. The EPA has strict rules on chemical run-off, retention in soil or ability to impact drinking water. On top of this, most farming is relatively low margin and farmers don't want to spray any more than they have to because of cost.
Meanwhile, the average suburban American will gladly dump 10x the appropriate amount of chemicals on their lawn in an attempt to keep up with the Jones' next door. Or think nothing of their fertilizer-infused irrigation spraying half onto the driveway or sidewalk, flowing directly into the storm sewer rather than being absorbed by the soil.
I'd be interested in solid numbers, but my own guess is that they will differ in the opposite direction, with the average farmer dumping many more chemicals per acre than the average lawn owner does. Crop-dusting in some areas happens daily, and when not daily, 1-3x per week. By contrast, very few lawn owners will apply pesticide to their lawn every day. Few will do it even once a week. The norm where I've lived seems to be 1-2x per year, which is hilariously infrequent to a farmer. Even if they over-apply in their very occasional pesticide treatment, they're starting from a baseline of much less frequent application.
It's easy to create a market for exploiting the environment, especially when the individual contribution to the whole of the exploitation is small. Sadly it's very difficult to create a market for preservation, especially when the individual impact is just as small.
I ask this non-rhetorically: how the hell does anyone turn that on its head, especially without government involvement?
The Ocean Research and Conservation Association is a nonprofit that's trying to promote the visibility of this problem (hypoxia caused by harmful blooms). They're doing this through the use of very low cost in situ sensor networks [1] and broad spectrum toxicology assays [2]. It's headed by Dr. Edie Widder [3], the scientist who got the first footage of the giant squid on last year's Discovery Channel cruise.
In combination with measuring physical/chemical parameters, they can automatically measure biological parameters of the environment. They've done this by miniaturizing and cost-reducing bathyphotometer [4] technology.
To the best of my very limited knowledge nobody else is looking at the problem this way. Everybody else measures physical/chemical parameters, and either infer what's happening to the biology, or they do point or small area biological sampling on an infrequent basis. And because it's so damn expensive there's always a big tradeoff between temporal and spatial resolution. With techniques like that everything is aggregate and there's little ability to tie specific action to specific consequences, let alone enforce any kind of feedback loop.
One of ORCA's biggest goals is to create a realtime water health gradient map that's promoted to and accessible by the general public. In a perfect world this would be used on the news right alongside the weather report.
I hate to cast a light of negativity but frankly I doubt they'll ever pull this off. Not because of lack of technical ability or people with the passion to do the work, but because of lack of stable funding. What's crazy is their technology is downright cheap, especially compared to the magnitude of the problem. If they could ever pull together the funding to engineer for manufacturability and do a full volume run, it'd be orders of magnitude less expensive.
I freely admit that I suck at marketing, so the best I can offer is a shameless plea. If this problem is important to you do something to solve it. Read up on nutrient limiting and how it impacts hypoxia. Find a polite way to tell your neighbor that their super green lawn might be sucking the life out of the waterways. Spend a bit more to buy your meat and produce from farms that limit runoff. If you have loose change, donate to organizations like ORCA or perhaps to someone more local to you.
Disclosure: I'm a former ORCA employee, but otherwise I'm no longer affiliated.
Edit:
Bathyphotometer link [4] refers to a larger, more expensive model Edie designed for the US Navy. See edited [1] for reference to smaller cost-reduced version.
I know you specified "without government involvement", but to be honest I think this is exactly the sort of thing that governments should be doing. Effectively what you're saying is that we have a problem with externalities (costs not borne by the agent who caused the cost). The best way to fight this is to create laws such as the carbon tax, which force businesses and individuals to pay the equivalent cost of the externalities.
I agree, and I hesitated before writing that. I phrased it that way not because I believe that government shouldn't be involved, but because given the current funding climate for endeavors such as these it's unreliable to expect the government to become involved.
Carbon credits would be perfect. In fact, if oceanographic organizations such as ORCA could get themselves into the benefactor stream (I'm not sure what the right term is), that would be great. Intuitively, it's not a stretch, either - massive swaths of hypoxic water could have huge impacts on global warming (lack of oxygen-producing organisms also means lack of carbon-consuming organisms, since they're one and the same). But unfortunately our political system is too complex and unless you've already got the funding to pay lobbyists you're just not going to get very far.
This dead zone is, in large measure, the result of US agriculture and ethanol subsidies, which encourage expanded and more intensive production than would otherwise exist.
In the case of the Mississippi outflow I'm with you to an extent. There's no doubt in my mind that agriculture runoff is the biggest contributor. Unfortunately removing agriculture subsidies won't fix the problem.
A number of people in the Chesapeake basin point the finger at chicken and pig farms in the region due to their controversial use of manure lagoons [1]. To the best of my knowledge these industries aren't heavily subsidized like corn and soy.
Then there's the whole issue of baselining. What's normal for the Mississippi river outflow? We've been observing the impacts to the fisheries there and the Chesapeake for hundreds of years, but we've only been measuring DO for a few decades and DO is far from the only thing that impacts fisheries. Further, the Mississippi dumps a ton of relatively still water that's full of tannins directly into the relatively still and warm gulf. I'm nowhere near qualified to say this conclusively, but I'd bet there have been yearly cycles of hypoxia there for millennia. Does this multiply or dampen our impacts?
This is a crazy complex multi-headed monster that looks completely different in every region it inhabits. For every one of these massive hypoxic regions there's a ton of other smaller ones. Next time you're bored take a look at the waterways in your area on Google maps, especially where small local canals or drainage ditches empty into larger bodies of water. Then go look at the topography of the area and try to back-of-the-envelope account for what all is pouring out of there. Then go do that for a completely different region. The diversity if nutrient inputs is insane.
The only reliable long-term way I can see to fix the problem is to get people to understand the impacts of their actions, and to associate those impacts with the things that they buy, consume, and produce. When you flush the toilet your poop goes somewhere. The same is true with your lawn clippings, farm waste, fertilizers, antibiotics, birth control, etc.
I'm curious if the dispersants used in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 may have been a contributing factor in addition to fertilizers and agricultural runoff? Or should I consider the Deepwater Horizon aftereffects water under the bridge by now?
Hypoxic regions are caused by an influx of various nutrient-limited organisms (hence why fertilizer is bad) which trigger a feeding cycle that destabilizes and ultimately kills off the oxygen-producing organisms in the impacted region. Once they're gone, carnivorous inverts which survive well in low oxygen environments move in and stabilize the environment to its newly-barren state.
I don't know for certain, but I'd guess that the chemical dispersants actually contributed to the reduction of hypoxia, since it introduced a new limiting factor for the organisms which start the cycle. That said, I'm sure dispersants aren't biased in what they poison, so it's important to note that this is probably a positive-looking indicator masking devastatingly negative phenomenon.
Not really. This would be a prime example of a negative externality, or a cost which results from an activity or transaction and which affects an otherwise uninvolved party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.[1]
Now fishermen will suffer so farmers can pull a profit. It's kind of the most simple form of unfairness. The kind that small children easily identify and question.
It's confusing that the only externality considered in the article or in the HN comments so far is "effect on fisheries".
Coastal regions are (typically) teaming with life of all kinds. I can live without people getting fresh fish quite as often as they're used to. I can't swallow destroying entire ecosystems out of wilful ignorance quite so easily.
It's accepted by those who benefit and don't get (directly) harmed and those who do get harmed don't get a say. See negative externalities and tragedy of the commons.
Your hyperbole here is incorrect and unwarranted. Agricultural chemicals in the US are highly regulated. Many types of fertilizers and pesticides have been banned, others have restrictions on the volume and timing of their use.
The EPA has a 10 Billion dollar budget, which it uses to do massive amounts of research to help control and mitigate negative externalities. Fines and penalties for violating EPA rules are severe.
Sorry, but the EPA isn't nearly as formidable or effective as you make it out to mb. As recently noted in the NYT:
"The Environmental Protection Agency is obliged under the Clean Water Act to monitor America’s waterways and shield them from the toxic runoff from factory farms. But the growth of that industry, and its courtroom tenacity, has far outstripped the E.P.A.’s efforts to restrict runoff from manure lagoons and feedlots.
Last year, the agency meekly withdrew two proposed rules. One would have gathered basic information from all factory farms. The other proposed rule would have expanded the number of such farms required to have a national pollution discharge permit. Fewer than 60 percent do now.
Then, last week, in yet another retreat, the agency announced that promised new regulations governing feedlot discharges nationally would not be forthcoming."
This is an op-ed, and leads to advocacy for a particular response. But the facts it's based on are not in question, and they seriously undermine any assertions that the EPA is as effective as it needs to be.
Farmers don't like to fertilize, it costs money. I remember long ago it being used to plant crops in fields that normally were off rotation because that crop was very profitable that year. That was ages ago so I don't know if it applies still.
Summary of the mechanisms behind hypoxia (site also includes data sets and other information): http://www.gulfhypoxia.net/Overview/
NOAA Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Watch: http://www.ncddc.noaa.gov/hypoxia/
Interactive map of eutropic and hypoxic zones worldwide, w/ data set from 2011: http://www.wri.org/project/eutrophication/map