By Steve Savage •
November 12, 2009
From the comment streams and emails I’ve been getting about recent posts, it is clear that many people believe things that are not actually true about the environmental profile of organic fertilizers. I don’t mean to minimize the challenge we face when it comes to fertilizers, particularly nitrogen fertilizers. They take energy to make, have the potential to generate the potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, and can lead to the pollution of ground and surface waters. With a “rap-sheet” like that I understand why people are concerned, but there is a catch - without fertilizers we don’t eat much.
Still, there is a widespread belief that “Organic” fertilizers are the solution. I’ve already blogged about why organic fertilizers are dramatically worse from a greenhouse gas point of view. Today I want to talk about the water pollution issues and why “Organic” fertilizers are actually a much worse problem from that perspective as well.
Why Nitrogen Fertilizers Can Pollute
The reason that ALL nitrogen fertilizers (synthetic and Organic) are a water pollution threat is that they at some point convert to the nitrate ion (NO3-). That particular form of nitrogen is very water soluble so the nitrate can move down into ground water or sideways into surface water. The “Dead Zone” or “Hypoxia zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is driven in some large part by nitrate coming from farms. There are ways to manage this issue, but first I need to talk about the fundemental challenge of crop fertilization.
By Joshua S Hill •
July 30, 2008
The dead zone that grows and shrinks in the Gulf of Mexico, at the outlet of the Mississippi River, has long been on my radar. Hurricanes too, have long been on my agenda, for fear that global warming is increasing their intensity and frequency. However I never thought that I would report on both in the same article, especially in this way.
According to Nancy Rabalais, head of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, the recent hurricane that swept through the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Dolly, managed to keep in check the growth of the dead zone.
“If it were not for Hurricane Dolly, the size of the Dead Zone would have been substantially larger,” she said in a news release sent from the consortium’s research vessel, the Pelica, as it returned from its annual mapping cruise, carrying Rabalais out at the same time each year to measure the area.
By Max Lindberg •
June 24, 2008
It’s not only the Gulf of Mexico that’s suffering from “dead zones” caused by excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus used as fertilizers.
Marine dead zones are spreading in the Baltic sea, and that could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse for lack of oxygen. Dire warnings from Lasse Gustavsson, Swedish head of the World Wildlife Funds branch in Sweden.
By Joshua S Hill •
June 22, 2008
If you have visited Planet Save for any length of time you will no doubt have seen me talk about the increasing amount of ‘dead zones’ cropping up across our planets watery surface. In particular, the Gulf of Mexico is home to what is believed to be the largest dead zone in the world: an area larger than Rhode Island that is almost totally devoid of oxygen in the water.
This particular dead zone has formed, in part, thanks to farm runoff that has made its way down the Mississippi River, all the way from Iowa and Wisconsin. Chemicals used on the farms are washed in to local waterways, which all eventually end in the Mississippi which thus makes its way down and out past New Orleans in to the Gulf of Mexico.
By Benjamin Jones •
April 3, 2008
Photo Source: marinebiology.edu
In case you didn’t know, the “dead zone” isn’t just a novel by Steven King or an old TV show, it’s an area about the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that during the summer months is incapable of supporting sea life. The dead zone is created when fertilizer run off promote algae growth, which in turn throws off the oceans equilibrium by using all the available oxygen, killing everything else. So, good for algae perhaps, but bad for the sea life in general.
Carectomy recently reported that ethanol production for passenger vehicles could be responsible for a growth in this dead zone. In their words:
Corn is the biggest culprit in creating these environments, and now that the U.S. is looking to biofuels as a solution to its energy needs, the problem’s only getting worse. Bush signed legislation at the end of 2007 that will triple the amount of corn ethanol produced over the next several years.
More after the jump!
By Clayton B. Cornell •
October 20, 2007
It looks like ethanol subsidies may impede efforts to reduce the size of the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A draft report from the EPA Science Advisory Board says that ethanol subsidies could lead to a dramatic increase in nutrient loading in the Mississippi river basin, due to diverting cropland to corn production.
Recent energy policies, combined with pre-existing crop subsidies, tax policies, global market conditions and trade barriers all provide economic
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