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Gulf Dead Zone: Bigger than ever

by Tom Philpott

17 Jul 2007

 

U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15
percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together --
not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the
Midwest -- you'd have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the
state of California.

The jump in corn acreage is excellent news if you own shares in mega
meat-processing firms like Tyson and Smithfield. These firms have been
complaining bitterly that the price of corn, driven up by the
government-induced ethanol boom, will eat into their profits. (Corn is the
preferred feed of CAFO operators, if not of the animals they confine.)
The California-sized corn planting is expected to deliver the largest corn
harvest in U.S. history, which will likely drive corn prices down a little.
But the corn boom absolutely sucks if you live in a fishing community along
the Gulf Coast -- or if you happen to be a fish who makes a home in those
troubled coastal waters.
Researchers projected [PDF] Monday that the Gulf of Mexico's Dead Zone, like
this year's corn harvest, will likely be the largest ever recorded.

According to major ag policy-makers in D.C., farmers' decisions to plant as
much corn as possible -- often on environmentally fragile land previously
kept fallow for conservation purposes -- was a farsighted and rational move.
The explosion in corn plantings "further confirms that production and usage
of biofuels can boost farm income, economic growth and jobs in rural
communities while enhancing America's energy security," enthused Sen. Tom
Harkin (D-Iowa), chair of the Senate ag committee.
The news drew similar raves at USDA headquarters. "It's just incredible,"
gushed the agency's chief economist Keith Collins. He added hopefully that
the huge corn crop should "give livestock feeders some relief."



But while Tyson and Smithfield execs breathe easier, fishing communities
along the Gulf Coast are bracing for disaster.

That's because growing corn in vast monocultured fields requires heavy doses
of synthetic nitrogen, but all of that fertilizer doesn't end up in corn
plants. A good bit of it washes into streams which feed into the Mississippi
River, then to be carried clear down to the Gulf.
In a process known as hypoxia, all of that free nitrogen feeds a giant algae
bloom, which ties up oxygen and destroys most life underneath: hence the
"Dead Zone."



According to a report (linked above) by researchers R. Eugene Turner of LSU
and Nancy Rabalais of the Louisiana University Marine Consortium,
preliminary measures of nitrogen passing into the Gulf through the
Mississippi, taken in May, augur the biggest Dead Zone ever recorded.
"Hypoxia as a large-scale phenomena was unlikely to have occurred before the
1970s," the researchers write. The Dead Zone's emergence roughly coincides
with the age when Earl "Rusty" Butz, Nixon's ag czar, ruled the USDA with an
iron fist. Butz famously used the power of his office to prod farmers to
plant "fencerow to fencerow," with as much fertilizer as required to produce
bumper crops. That policy has been in place ever since.
Thirty odd years later, we're still allowing our government to sacrifice the
Gulf's biodiversity, along with the livelihoods of surrounding fishing
communities, to produce dubious fuel and ghastly meat.

 

The mind reels.

 


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