By Art Cullen | May 13, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT | The Washington Post
Farmers are poisoning the gulf for the sake of corn, wheat, cotton and rice.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Iowa. This op-ed is adapted from an editorial that appeared in that newspaper.
Three of us, old college buddies, set out on a journey last month in an all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup with the goal of reaching New Orleans to learn how our inland waters are faring.
We started out in Dubuque, Iowa. Range anxiety in an F-150 is real, and it gets worse the farther south you go in oil country. When chargers are more than 100 miles apart and you’re bucking a headwind bang on your nose, it can make for an edgy and sweaty haul from Jackson, Miss., to the Big Easy. Fortunately, one man onboard is a retired clinical psychologist. He told us everything would be okay when the charger wouldn’t work amid a downpour in Missouri. That kept grown men from crying.
When we began, freshly planted Iowa river bottoms, enriched by fertilizer, lay inundated by heavy rains that broke the back of a four-year drought here in the Corn Belt. About 30 percent of the nitrogen applied for raising corn is lost to water, and much of it right now is draining off in the spring rise.
All that detritus, the tons upon tons of soil with phosphorous mixed in, float downstream past St. Louis, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, suffocating the Gulf of Mexico for the sake of corn, wheat, cotton and rice. They call it the Dead Zone, where almost nothing can live.
The shrimp spawning in the brackish Louisiana marshes can’t find their way to deeper water to mature. Smaller shrimp fetch less for the shrimpers. The economic loss from gulf hypoxia is estimated at up to $2.4 billion per year.
It’s a bad combo: Bare Iowa soil in spring. Increasingly extreme weather with torrents of rain. Underground tiles, installed by farmers to help drain their cornfields and keep crops dry, are everywhere now in northwest Iowa — the drainage capacity has doubled since 1980. The effluent from these tiles pours into to the Raccoon River, swelling from the spring flush. The Raccoon runs southeast in Iowa, joins the Des Moines River, then feeds the Mississippi, which feeds the gulf and stunts the shrimp.
Methane is cheap in the gulf, where oil and gas derricks line the horizon. We ship the gas upstream to Iowa, where it is processed into anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer. Farmers inject it in the soil to feed the corn that feeds the hogs that create the phosphorus in their manure. It flushes down the Raccoon all over again.
We hooch nearly half our corn crop not into food or feed but into ethanol for cars, which is why we plant up to the last inch of the creek side and river bank. We wear suspenders with our belts for a bumper crop — we dump manure on top of the commercial anhydrous ammonia to get that next marginal bushel of corn. It’s killing us, or at least killing the gulf.
“The nitrogen cycle is very complex,” said Nancy Rabalais, a leading authority on gulf hypoxia, along with her husband, R. Eugene Turner, at Louisiana State University. It has been documented for a half-century. The Dead Zone ebbs and flows with the spring rains, from 4,000 square miles to 7,000, nearly the size of New Jersey.
The cycle involves politics. We insure and subsidize crops through the Farm Bill, and we prop up ethanol through federal fuel blending mandates, and climate money is used to build carbon dioxide pipelines from ethanol distilleries to spent fracking holes, where it is buried. Rabalais said the system is built around “nitrodollars.”
The Raccoon River ran clean before 1980, when the Farm Bill was changed to maximize production, according to Jerry Hatfield, agronomist and former director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment at Iowa State University, and farmers began planting fencerow to fencerow. Now the Raccoon is one of America’s most endangered rivers, according to the advocacy group American Rivers. (Visit The Washington Post for the entire article)
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