There’s an Amazingly Simple, Beautiful Way to Fix Midwestern Farmlands

April 25, 2019 - Tom Philpott

The Midwest’s farms produce corn and soybeans on an epic scale: enough to supply feed for the great bulk of the cows, chickens, and pigs that satisfy the country’s ravenous meat habit, provide a large portion of the sweeteners and fats that go into processed foods, and generate about a tenth of car fuel in the form of ethanol. Typically, there’s even enough of these crops left over each year for hugeexports and surpluses.

But in the process of churning out such gargantuan bounty, these farms also leak nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer, which feed massive algae blooms. The blooms appear from Lake Erie clear to the Gulf of Mexico, where the globe’s second-biggest coastal dead zoneforms every summer. Renegade farm fertilizer also fouls water supplies in cities and towns throughout the corn belt, including Des Moines, Iowa, and Columbus, Ohio, along with residential wells. Even at levels well below the US Environmental Protection Agency’s legal limit for drinking water, nitrates from fertilizer have been associated with heightened risk of bladder, ovarian, and thyroid cancer.

A new study from Michigan State University researchers points to a shockingly simple way farmers could help fix this pollution problem. And the strategy could improve their profits, which have declined sharply in recent years. All growers would have to do, the researchers posit, is retire about a quarter of the acres they now devote to corn and soybeans.

See full article at Mother Jones.