Andrew Lewin delves into the issue of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by runoff from the Mississippi River. Despite efforts to reduce nitrates and phosphates by 20% by 2025, it appears that targets may not be met. Andrew shares his personal and professional connection to this topic, having worked on the hypoxic zone early in his career. Tune in to learn more about the challenges facing the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico and how you can take action to protect our oceans.
Link to article: https://www.kcur.org/news/2024-06-24/as-conservation-in-agriculture-lags-so-does-the-progress-in-slashing-the-gulfs-dead-zone
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The Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone is a critical environmental issue primarily caused by runoff from the Mississippi River. This runoff carries excessive nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from agricultural activities along the river's basin. Upon reaching the Gulf of Mexico, these nutrients fuel the growth of phytoplankton, leading to massive algal blooms. Subsequently, these blooms die and sink to the ocean floor, where bacteria decompose them. This decomposition process consumes oxygen, creating a hypoxic or "dead zone" where oxygen levels are too low to support marine life.
The size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico fluctuates annually but has been on an upward trend, indicating a worsening situation. This zone poses a significant threat to marine ecosystems by depriving fish, invertebrates, and other marine organisms of the oxygen they need to survive. The expansion of the hypoxic zone is a direct result of human activities, particularly agricultural practices contributing to nutrient runoff into the Mississippi River.
Efforts to address the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone include implementing conservation practices to reduce nutrient runoff. These practices, such as cover crops, reduced tillage, and no-till farming methods, aim to minimize the amount of fertilizers and chemicals entering waterways. While some progress has been made in reducing nitrogen loads in the Mississippi River, phosphorus loads have worsened, indicating the need for more comprehensive and effective conservation measures.
It is crucial to collaborate with local farmers to promote sustainable agricultural practices that protect water quality and reduce nutrient pollution. By investing in conservation programs, providing technical assistance, and incentivizing farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices, we can mitigate the harmful effects of nutrient runoff on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Ultimately, addressing the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone requires a multi-faceted approach that prioritizes environmental conservation, sustainable agriculture, and the protection of marine biodiversity.
Efforts to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in the Mississippi River have been crucial in addressing the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. However, as highlighted in the podcast episode, these efforts have not met the targets set to reduce the nutrient loads entering the river system. Despite some implemented practices showing promise, such as cover crops that help absorb excess nutrients to prevent runoff, there are other practices exacerbating the issue.
One concerning practice mentioned in the episode is the over-fertilization of corn acres along the Mississippi River. Farmers, driven by the belief that more fertilizer leads to higher yields, continue to apply excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus to their crops. This over-fertilization contributes to the nutrient loads entering the river, ultimately fueling the growth of phytoplankton in the Gulf of Mexico and leading to the formation of the hypoxic zone.
Moreover, the increase in the number of US acres drained with underground tubes, which act as conduits for runoff into streams and rivers, has further exacerbated the problem. The expansion of this infrastructure facilitates the rapid transport of nutrients from agricultural lands into water bodies, including the Mississippi River, intensifying the nutrient pollution issue.
These findings underscore the complexity of addressing nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. While some conservation practices have shown positive results in reducing nutrient runoff, the persistence of harmful practices like over-fertilization and the expansion of drainage systems pose challenges to achieving the desired reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus levels. It is evident that a comprehensive and collaborative approach involving farmers, policymakers, and conservationists is essential to effectively tackle the nutrient pollution problem and protect the health of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.
Collaboration with local farmers is essential for improving water quality in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. The episode highlights the significant impact of agricultural runoff, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers, on the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. These nutrients lead to excessive phytoplankton growth, which, when decomposed, depletes oxygen levels in the water, creating a hypoxic environment unsuitable for marine life.
Implementing conservation practices, such as cover crops and reduced tillage, can help mitigate nutrient runoff from farms into water bodies. However, the episode also acknowledges the challenges faced by farmers, such as reduced crop yields with certain conservation practices. This highlights the importance of providing support and incentives for farmers to adopt sustainable practices that benefit both their livelihoods and the environment.
The episode discusses various initiatives and investments by government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, to promote conservation programs and technical assistance for farmers in the Mississippi River basin states. These programs aim to reduce nutrient loss and improve water quality through practices like installing saturated buffers and bioreactors.
Furthermore, the episode emphasizes the need for continued collaboration and communication with local farmers to address harmful agricultural practices and promote sustainable solutions. By working together with farmers, researchers, and policymakers, it is possible to implement effective strategies that protect water quality in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, benefiting both the environment and the communities that rely on these water bodies for their livelihoods.
the Gulf of Mexico, hypoxic problem is a big problem. The, you know, there's about 5,000 square miles of area where the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is hypoxic. I mean, there's no oxygen available for, to establish life for fish, invertebrates, and other types of life that require oxygen to live. And a lot of the times it's due to run off from the Mississippi River. Now, by 2025, it was supposed to be reduced, the amount of nitrates and phosphates in the river systems were supposed to be reduced by 20%. But it doesn't look like they're gonna meet their targets, even though there have been certain practices that have actually been implemented and working, but other practices have been implemented and working that aren't more about conservation, but more about applying fertilizers and other things to help maintain or increase the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous in the Mississippi River. Now, the Mississippi River covers a lot of area in the US, and so we need to talk about this on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico and the Hypoxic Zone. It's a little bit of a personal thing for me and a professional thing for me because I worked on the Hypoxic Zone when it was my first marine job. It was my first, my second job coming out of university. I got to live on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico out of the Lumbcon, Louisiana University's Marine Conservation Institute, where we got to work, we worked with Dr. Nancy Raebole and her team to measure the Hypoxic Zone every year in the ocean. Now I was only there for eight months, but I got to spend one summer doing that. There's always been a special thing to me because I just couldn't believe the amount of like the size of the area that is considered hypoxic in the Gulf of Mexico. It ranges in size every year, but it's, you know, it hasn't been getting smaller and smaller on a downward trend. It's actually increasing. And to do that, I remember Dr. Nancy Raebole having to testify in front of Congress to be able to say, hey, you know, all these farms that are along the Mississippi River which go all the way up to Minnesota, they're dumping their phosphorus and nitrogen into the, like their fertilizers and chemicals and everything into the Gulf of Mexico or into the Mississippi River which goes all the way down to cumulates. And then when it gets to the Gulf of Mexico, right at the mouth, things happen. We're gonna talk about that in just a sec, before we do, I just want to let you guys know, if you like this type of news and you wanna hear more about this type of news that you can be aware of what's happening in the ocean, that you can make better decisions, you can just sign up for our newsletter. It's, if you go to speakupforblue.com/newsletter, that's speakupforblue.com/newsletter, you can get access in your inbox to news five days a week about the ocean. Now, this is something that I've been putting together for the last month or so. I also have it on LinkedIn, but this one's going right to your inbox. All you have to do is go speakupforblue.com/newsletter, get access to that newsletter. It's gonna be great, people are really liking it, you can respond to me and you get direct access to my email from there, it's just wonderful. So that's speakupforblue.com/newsletter, sign up for that newsletter, get five days a week to your inbox of ocean news and jobs to you, by the way. And we also update you on the podcast. But regarding the podcast, let's talk about the Gulf of Mexico, let's talk about the hypoxic zone. So essentially what happens as all these nutrients reach the end of the, of the Mississippi or the mouth of the Mississippi or empties into the Gulf of Mexico, there's a lot of heat at this point, it's the springtime, there's a lot of heat. During that springtime, you get some mixing of that nice hot, hot water, you get a sunshine, you get nitrogen, you get oxygen, you get phytoplankton, you get this massive bloom of phytoplankton that is fed by the limiting factor of phosphorus and nitrogen, so it's even bigger and bigger. So depending on how much nitrogen and ox, or nitrogen and phosphorus are in the water, really depends on the size of the bloom. Now, you're probably wondering, well look, it's feeding plant life. We do that in our gardens all the time to make sure our gardens grow true, but you want the right things to grow. You don't want the wrong things to grow. So now I have a pretty big garden and I am convinced that, I'm not a huge gardener in terms of a light like gardening, but I am convinced that gardening is not gardening. It's just taking out weeds every week from your garden. That's essentially what you're doing. And it's pretty laborious, I'll be honest. Not something I was ready to jump into when I first bought this house 20 some odd years ago. But regardless, I still do it each and every week because you have to, because if you fertilize the area, you're gonna get growth. And that's what you get with these phytoplankton, the Gulf of Mexico, you get that type of growth. That growth turns into this huge bloom of phytoplankton. The phytoplankton float across the and mix in, across the water column, as well as across the Gulf of Mexico as the massive water that's coming out of the Mississippi pushes it into the Gulf of Mexico. You get this huge sort of plume, the Mississippi River plume, which is probably some sediment as well as anything that comes out of the Mississippi going right into the Gulf of Mexico. And it comes out pretty darn far. And so when you have all these plankton like mixing in the ocean, then all of a sudden the wind stops. If you ever been down south in the US, you know that the wind stops in the summer and it gets hot and it stays hot until about August. With that said, when it stays hot and it doesn't mix, eventually that phytoplankton's gonna die. It doesn't have a long life. That phytoplankton dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. That bottom of the ocean, the microbial loops, the bacteria start breaking down the dead cells of the plants, of this phytoplankton, 'cause it's a plant life. And you get, when it starts to eat it, it takes out oxygen as part of that process. So when there's enough phytoplank, dead phytoplankton and there's enough microbial loop, it grows and grows and grows it takes up enough oxygen, it takes it out of the system and you have a hypoxic zone. Now the size of the hypoxic zone depends on the size of the plume that lands there. And so it's been as far as Texas, it's been as down further, almost like halfway down the Gulf of Mexico. It's a pretty big area and it's not a good thing. It's a really, really bad thing that we need to clean up. To clean it up, scientists, when they measure that, they go to Congress and they start to present their results and they say, look, this is what we're seeing. These are the chemicals that we're seeing in the ocean and it's a lot of nitrogen, a lot of phosphorus, especially at the mouth of the Mississippi River. We need to limit these two items because these are the items that are the limiting factor of the growth of this plankton and so it can get really out of place. Now, without this extra nitrogen and phosphorus, you'll still get phytoplankton blooms. Those won't go away, but the amount of, and the size of the bloom will be limited by the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the system. So you just want natural amounts, you don't want a lot. So when you have a lot, you get these big blooms, you get the microbial loop coming in when they're dead, you get the oxygen taken away and you get a hypoxic zone. So what happens is now, Congress gets all that information and they go back to the areas in the communities and this is conservation where you talk to local communities along the Mississippi River to say, hey guys, we have a lot of farms along here that are putting up fertilizers on their crops to fertilize the crops and then that fertilizer ends up running off and going into the system. Now, there's also wastewater plants that are along the entire system and the wastewater plants have been getting better. They've been getting better at filtering out nitrogen, filtering out phosphorus, but they can't do it all. They can do it only at point, what we call point sources where we know where the water that's cleaned up by these wastewater treatment plants are coming into the river that's at a specific point. It's a point source and we can measure that point source to ensure that the amount of nitrogen, the amount of ammonia, the amount of phosphorus, is limited to a specific amount. I can't go above a specific amount. Now, this amount is modeled over time to find out like what other things are coming from upstream, coming downstream and so how does that accumulate and how is that going to affect at the mouth of the river? So there's huge complex models that are involved in that but there's a number at the end of that pipe at that point source where wastewater engineers and scientists can measure and say, hey, this is a good number, we're okay with this number if it's because that's but it can't go above that number or else you get fined. And that's the wastewater treatment plant that's run by government and probably counties and so forth, I'm not exactly sure how it works or who's in charge of those wastewater treatment plants along the Mississippi River 'cause there's different states and different rules and everything. But regardless, there's a point source. Now, there's also non-point sources where the water enters, where the fertilizer, the chemicals enter, or the nutrients enter the river at different points along the way but there's no real one-point source, we call them non-point sources. So that includes fertilizer runoff or soil runoff or anything that could be like coastal erosion or anything like that along the Mississippi. And that's where farms come into play and that's where farm practices are becoming more and more important to limiting these nutrients from getting into the Mississippi. So what was nice and is that at one point, the amount of nitrogen loads that were going into the Mississippi, I think over the last year, decreased by 23% from the baseline period in 2021. However, the five-year running average which accounts for extremely wet and dry years, more common with, guess what? Climate change tells a different story. By that measure, nitrogen is only slightly below the baseline and well above the 20% target. So the 20% that they want to reduce. Phosphorus loads worsened since the baseline period. So that's gotten even worse. So that's where we're at right now, right? That's where we're at. So there are specific practices that will help where we're looking at reducing the runoff. So the big thing is cover crops. So it's like, hey, you're something that you put on that will go on top of the crops once they're actually harvested. And it goes on the crops and it uptakes all the extra fertilizer, the nutrients from the fertilizer. So it doesn't run off when it rains. And so that helps in keeping it down. The problem with that is that farmers find that they get a lower yield of their actual crops. So it's not just when they're harvested, they put it on top after they put the fertilizer down. But the problem is, is when they, farmers are thinking, especially old practices, the more fertilizer you have, the more productive your yield's gonna be. The more you take it away, even if it's like trace amounts, you're not gonna be as productive. And that's what they've noticed in certain farming practices along the Mississippi is that they've actually gotten a decrease. And so that's not helping. And overall, practices that don't really put in conservation practices in place are acres with reduced tileage, which are acres with tileage, or it's reduced is great, it's a down 20%, or sorry, rose 20% during that time, and no till was up 9%. But they're also done on a sliver of total harvested acres. So Sarah Carlson, who's an agronomist and senior programs and member engagement director at Practical Farms of Iowa, says, we need every other field in some kind of winter cover to drive down nutrient loss. We are way, way behind, it's not even close. So there's areas where you have to make sure that you minimize the amount of runoff that's going on. It's just not happening. So that's a problem. And like I said before, they're starting to see reduced yields and some farmers just can't afford that. It's kinda like when we talk in the ocean about fishers, especially local fishers, they have to pay and feed their families. I think I paid feed their families, send them to school in often these cases. In the US, maybe not send them to school, but they have to pay to feed their families. And so, and they have other things to pay and to take care of their families. And they just don't have that. Now, the government is putting in money. So the US Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS, invested $14.2 billion between the fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2021 on voluntary conservation programs and technical assistance in the 12 Task Force States, which is Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. And the Inflation Reduction Act will spend another $19.5 billion across the country on the climate smart agriculture, which could include projects with water quality benefits, which is always great. Now, you gotta also remember that when Plankton get broken down, methane is created and that's released into the atmosphere. That also contributes to climate change more so than carbon dioxide. Now, some states are also having their own programs to pay for water quality projects. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship had spent $1.17 million, which includes federal money to install saturated buffers and bioreactors to filter water from underground drainage tiles before it flows into streams. And farmers do not have to pay anything for those projects. In fact, they actually get $1,000 for each practice that's added to their property. Now, with that said, with those going into place, that's great, it's what's needed. But unfortunately, there are other practices that are making the problem worse. So the number of US acres drained with underground tubes, which essentially act as a superhighway for runoff into streams and rivers, increased by 9.5% from 48.6 million acres in 2012 to 53.1 million acres in 2022. Farmers are also raising 12% more hogs from 66 million in 2012 to 73.8 million hogs in 2022. Combined sales of a synthetic fertilizer in four Midwest states, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota went up 10.6% from fiscal 2016 to fiscal 2020. So the thing we, it says here, Jones was their agronomist across the Midwest report. This is what he says. He says, the thing that we never want to talk about is that at the same time we're adopting practices, we're also doing other things on the other side of the ledger to make things worse. So many of our corn acres are being over-fertilized. This is USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, said it may be May 3rd event in Illinois. So he says, you know, the Farm Bill will be considering, it will be, the Farm Bill being now being considered in Congress would provide money for research sensors to allow farmers to know exactly how much fertilizer they need to do. Like I said, historical practices say, hey, you know what? If we put out more fertilizer, we'll get a higher percentage of yield, but it's not taking into account how many farmers are along the Mississippi, that highway of water going right down to the Gulf of Mexico and the effect on the Gulf of Mexico, which affects fishers, ecotourism, all throughout the Gulf of Mexico. So there's a lot to be done here. We're seeing some areas of improvement, but we're also seeing some areas where there's increased of harmful practices to this reduction movement. So, you know, we are still not out of the woods. Although there's capabilities here, we need to increase the capabilities of these farmers. We need to work with more farmers. We need to make sure that, you know, maybe there's a compensation package for them, just like, you know, some people to have in, for fisheries when they can't fish anymore because of a marine protected area. There's got to be something for them to support them. This is not an episode to bash the farmers by any means. This is an episode to say, we need to work better with local farmers. We need to work better to protect the water quality of the Mississippi and, of course, the Gulf of Mexico to help fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico and people who use the Gulf of Mexico to make their livelihood. And of course, we need to reduce climate change, which all this will help. So there's a lot going on. There's a lot of money being invested. Is it being invested for the right thing? That's another episode that we could do. But that's the episode for today. I would love to hear your thoughts. Get me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. What do you think should be done if you have any more information on harmful farm practices or even how farmers are improving the reduction of runoff of their fertilizer? I would love to hear about it. And I'll share it with the collective community, this audience here on the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. If you want to sign up for our newsletter to find out more about not only these practices, but other practices and other conservation issues, you can do so by signing up to our newsletter for free. It's speakupforblue.com/newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com/newsletter. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Angela, and have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation. (upbeat music) (clicking)
