With an easy drawl, Dean Blanchard, the owner of Dean Blanchard Seafood in the barrier-island town of Grand Isle, Louisiana, makes an understated observation: “There’s a reason they call it a dead zone. When the dead zone comes, everything’s dead. We can’t catch dead stuff. We’re in the live stuff business.”
What Blanchard is talking about is the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone,” an enormous area in which, every spring, an overgrowth of algae and other vegetation absorbs dissolved oxygen from the water and kills all animal life. The dead zone is staggeringly large, covering an average of 5,380 square miles. In 2017, the zone mushroomed to an astonishing 8,776 square miles—as big as the state of New Jersey. In that area, no aquatic life can survive.
“This year,” Blanchard says, “we had shrimp jumping on the beach, committing suicide, trying to get out of the water because there’s no oxygen.”
The result is an economic disaster. To find live shrimp, fishers have to ply their boats as far as fifty miles from shore. “With the price of fuel, you don’t want to go too far,” Blanchard says. His company’s annual haul has declined from twelve million pounds of shrimp a year to under five million. He used to employ sixty workers—now he’s down to thirty.
Blanchard’s woes are far from unique. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Harmful algal blooms and hypoxia cost the U.S. seafood and tourism industries approximately $82 million per year.”
Dean Blanchard Seafood
“We had shrimp jumping on the beach, committing suicide, trying to get out of the water because there’s no oxygen,” says Dean Blanchard, who runs his seafood company out of Grand Isle, Louisiana.
Two nutrients are primarily responsible for creating the dead zone: nitrogen and phosphorus. They run off from farm fields in enormous quantities into the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers and their numerous tributaries, and flow into the Gulf. The result is eutrophication, an excessive amount of nutrients that stimulate rapid and dense growth of plant life. As plant life decays, it sinks deeper into the Gulf and bacteria consume the plants. As the bacteria do so, they draw dissolved oxygen from the water causing hypoxia, or a low level of oxygen, making it impossible for animal life to survive.
The result? Environmental and economic disasters—not only in the Gulf but also throughout the Mississippi River Basin. Matt Rota, senior policy director for Healthy Gulf in New Orleans, explains: “Because of this nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, you have increased levels of toxic algae—blue-green algae [also known as harmful algal blooms]—in some of these areas. That’s a problem we see throughout the Mississippi River Basin, because this much pollution leads to constant algae blooms, which can cause aesthetic issues, drinking water issues, and toxicity.”
Rota continues, “For example, there have been studies on the Atlantic croaker in the Gulf, and when they get into these areas of low oxygen, this causes problems with reproduction and sexual dimorphism, where the sexual system goes from male to female. There’s an endocrine disruption.”
The amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous in the Mississippi River Basin have exploded over the past several decades for four reasons:
- Wastewater treatment plants fail to remove all of the phosphorus and nitrogen from treated water.
- Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, produce enormous amounts of manure, which can spill over and carry nitrogen and other chemicals into adjoining rivers and streams.
- Industrial agriculture employs vast amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. According to Trevor Russell, the water program director at Friends of the Mississippi River, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, “The largest source of nutrient pollution to the Mississippi River Basin, broadly speaking, is from agricultural runoff from cropland fertilization.”
- Through erosion, nutrient-laden sediment seeps into waterways.
Several factors make nutrient pollution tough to manage and regulate. The pollutants flow into the Gulf from the entire Mississippi River Basin, which covers 1.2 million square miles.
The sources of the pollution are highly decentralized; we’re talking about thousands of farms, wastewater treatment plants, and CAFOs spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles.
In addition, the Clean Water Act of 1972 allows the federal government to regulate point-source water pollution—pollution that comes from a specific source, such as a pipe. But the law does not include effective regulation of nonpoint sources, which entail diffuse sources, such as nutrient pollutants running off agricultural lands. As a result, Rota explains, “In the vast majority of the Mississippi River states, there are not even numeric standards for nitrogen and phosphorus.”
By the late 1990s, it was clear that something had to be done to restore the Gulf to ecological health. In 1997, twelve states and five federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Tribal Water Council, which represents American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, formed the Hypoxia Task Force to develop and coordinate strategies for reducing nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River Basin. The twelve states are Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
The task force aimed to shrink the Gulf dead zone from an average size of almost 6,000 square miles to about 2,000 square miles by 2035. To do so, they agreed to reduce total nitrogen and phosphorus loads flowing into the Gulf by 45 percent by 2035, with an interim goal of 20 percent reduction by 2025. By January 2017, all twelve of the states had written nutrient reduction strategies.
Since the task force’s formation, some states have successfully reduced the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen emitted by wastewater treatment plants, a process that requires upgrading treatment systems.
In Illinois, the largest source of phosphorus and the second-largest source of nitrogen in the Mississippi River Basin, wastewater treatment plants and other plants in the point-source sector have tripled capital investments, to $185.2 million in 2020, to improve nutrient removal and control sewer overflows. By 2020, the state had reduced phosphorus loads in its waterways by 16 percent from 2011 levels. The reduction has occurred because the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency lists bodies of water that are impaired, or polluted. The agency develops total maximum daily loads, which set maximum limits on pollutant loads, including phosphorus and nitrogen. The Illinois EPA then issues permits, and through this permitting process, the state has required wastewater treatment plants to reduce nutrients in treated water.
Susan Webb
In Minnesota, Friends of the Mississippi River’s Trevor Russell explains, “The Metro Council operates seven plants in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Those facilities have had about an 88 percent reduction in total phosphorus in the Mississippi River just since 2000.” This progress has happened because the nutrients from wastewater treatment plants are point-source pollutants and, as a result, are regulated under the auspices of the Clean Water Act.
However, CAFOs and industrial agriculture continue to be enormous sources of nutrient pollution. Matthew Sheets, a policy organizer with the Land Stewardship Project, a nonprofit based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that promotes sustainable agriculture, says, “The reason why CAFOs are typically more dangerous for water quality is that they use what are called manure lagoons to hold their manure. There have been multiple instances of manure lagoons overflowing. When we had a lot of water earlier this year, there were manure lagoons in South Dakota that were reported to have overflowed.” The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that CAFOs contribute about 15 percent of the nutrient pollution that creates the Gulf dead zone.
But as problematic as CAFOs are, farmland pollution remains the largest source of nutrient pollution. Alicia Vasto, the water program associate director for the Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit in Des Moines, notes that “there has been a lack of progress for a couple of reasons. The major reason is that there’s a big vested interest on behalf of major agricultural companies that want to continue to sell fertilizer and seed and pesticides. Any kind of discussion about mandatory measures or regulations is heavily opposed by those big agricultural interests. That’s really the only way we’re going to see actual real progress in addressing nutrient pollution.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the twelve member states of the Hypoxia Task Force have all taken steps to encourage agricultural practices that reduce nutrient runoff from agricultural lands. Applying fertilizers in the correct amounts and at the right times of the year can reduce runoff. Farmers can plant cover crops such as alfalfa, rye, and clover to improve soil health and reduce erosion and runoff. Farmers can also decrease how often they till the land. Most farmlands in the Midwest have drainage tiles to carry excess water into adjoining streams. And farmers can place woodchip bioreactors, which absorb nitrates before they are released into waterways, into these drainage tiles.
All of these measures are voluntary—and they have all fallen short. According to Indra Frank, the environmental health and water policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council in Indiana, “[T]he percent of Indiana cropland using no-till remained essentially unchanged from 2005 to 2019 at 38 percent, and the percent of Indiana cropland using cover crops . . . actually dropped to 8 percent in 2019,” Civil Eats reported.
Yet despite the lack of progress, one state—Minnesota—has emerged as a leader in promoting progressive agricultural practices that reduce nutrient runoff. In 2015, the state legislature passed a law requiring farm fields to have buffer zones of perennial vegetation of up to fifty feet along lakes, rivers, and streams. The buffers filter out nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment before runoff enters waterways.
In addition, Russell explains, “What we need is to embrace the concept of continuous living cover.” He’s talking about regenerative agriculture, which reduces fertilizer use and restores soil health in ways that enhance farm income. Donald Wyse, professor and co-director of the Center for Integrated Natural Resources and Agricultural Management at the University of Minnesota, is developing practical applications of regenerative agriculture, The New York Times reported. In 2012, he co-founded the Forever Green Initiative, with the goal of keeping plants in the ground year-round rather than having the soil lie bare to the elements and vulnerable to runoff.
Russell gives examples of new cover crops that can enhance farmers’ income, improve soil health, and reduce nutrient runoff. The first is camelina, an oil seed that farmers can plant into standing corn in late summer. “Instead of barren soil for miles and miles,” Russell explains, “you’ve got green, lush camelina that will sprout and produce oil seed. That oil seed can be used as an edible fuel, or a heavy industry biofuel, or a biodiesel fuel.” In addition, the farmer benefits from three harvests instead of the two traditional harvests of corn and soybeans.
The second example is Kernza, a perennial wheat. Above the soil, it grows like a traditional wheat crop, but below the soil, it acts as a prairie plant, with a sixteen-feet-deep root system. Farmers plant it once, and for the next three, four, or even five years, the farmer has a wheat harvest. During those years, the farmer isn’t tilling or fertilizing, and there is a living cover on the field year-round.
Russell says, “In both of these cases, you’ve got the attributes we’re looking for. It’s market-based. There’s going to be some additional public support necessary to help build out supply chains and generate market demand. Once that market becomes self-sustaining, you don’t need public subsidies as you do for traditional crops.”
Yet despite this promising research, the fact remains that in the twenty-five years since the formation of the Hypoxia Task Force, precious little progress has been made. “The EPA should take a strong leadership role in this,” the Iowa Environmental Council’s Alicia Vasto asserts, “but they haven’t put enough pressure on the states.”
Congress might be starting to realize that the federal government has to take a stronger leading role to save the Gulf. In June, the EPA announced that it will provide $60 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to reduce nutrient pollution.
And in 2021, Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, introduced the Mississippi River Restoration and Resilience Initiative, which would authorize annual spending of up to $350 million to restore the ecological health of the Mississippi River Basin. This bill would provide funds to reduce urban and agricultural runoff, remove invasive species, improve erosion control, provide habitat for native species, and restore the natural hydrology of the Mississippi River. The proposed bill is modeled after the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a bipartisan law that has devoted billions of dollars to cleaning up the Great Lakes.
What’s happening to the Gulf of Mexico is the end result of an insidious trend toward industrial agriculture over the past several decades. The Land Stewardship Project’s Matthew Sheets says, “We are losing farmers. The system is working against the small and midsized farms.” For that reason, the Land Stewardship Project has undertaken grassroots organizing against CAFOs. He says, “Over forty years, we have successfully pushed back against forty different factory farms. We’ve done that by grassroots organizing with people who ask us to come into their community and help them.”
A blend of stronger federal leadership, scientific research for regenerative agriculture, and community organizing offers hope that progress can finally be made to restore the Gulf of Mexico to ecological health.