Chemicals in Farm Runoff Rattle States on the Mississippi

Dead zones have been occurring in the gulf since the 1970s, and studies show that the main culprits are nitrogen and phosphorus from crop fertilizers and animal manure in river runoff. They settle in at the mouth of the gulf and fertilize algae, which prospers and eventually starves other living things of oxygen.

Government studies have traced a majority of those chemicals in the runoff to nine farming states, and yet today, decades after the dead zones began forming, there is still little political common ground on how to abate this perennial problem. Scientists who study dead zones predict that the affected area will increase significantly this year, breaking records for size and damage.

For years, environmentalists and advocates for a cleaner gulf have been calling for federal action in the form of regulation. Since 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency has been encouraging all states to place hard and fast numerical limits on the amount of those chemicals allowed in local waterways. Yet of the nine key farm states that feed the dead zone, only two, Illinois and Indiana, have acted, and only to cover lakes, not the rivers or streams that merge into the Mississippi.

The lack of formal action upstream has long been maddening to the downstream states most affected by the pollution, and the extreme flooding this year has only increased the tensions.

“Considering the current circumstances, it is extremely frustrating not seeing E.P.A. take more direct action,” said Matt Rota, director of science and water policy for the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental advocacy group in New Orleans that has renewed its calls for federally enforced targets. “We have tried solely voluntary mechanisms to reduce this pollution for a decade and have only seen the dead zone get bigger.”

Environmental Protection Agency officials said they had no immediate plans to force the issue, but farmers in the Mississippi Basin are worried. That is because only six months ago, the agency stepped in at the Chesapeake Bay, another watershed with similar runoff issues, and set total maximum daily loads for those same pollutants in nearby waterways. If the states do not reduce enough pollution over time, the agency could penalize them in a variety of ways, including increasing federal oversight of state programs or denying new wastewater permitting rights, which could hamper development. The agency says it is too soon to evaluate their progress in reducing pollution.

Don Parish, senior director of regulatory relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group, says behind that policy is the faulty assumption that farmers fertilize too much or too casually. Since 1980, he said, farmers have increased corn yields by 80 percent while at the same time reducing their nitrate use by 4 percent through precision farming.

“We are on the razor’s edge,” Mr. Parish said. “When you get to the point where you are taking more from the soil than you are putting in, then you have to worry about productivity.”

Dead zones are areas of the ocean where low oxygen levels can stress or kill bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot escape and cause fish to leave the area. Excess nutrients transported to the gulf each year during spring floods promote algal growth. As the algae die and decompose, oxygen is consumed, creating the dead zone. The largest dead zone was measured in 2002 at about 8,500 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey. Shrimp fishermen complain of being hurt the most by the dead zones as shrimp are less able to relocate — but the precise impacts on species are still being studied.

The United States Geological Survey has found that nine states along the Mississippi contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus. The survey found that corn and soybean crops were the largest contributors to the nitrogen in the runoff, and manure was a large contributor to the amount of phosphorus.

There are many other factors, of course, that determine what elements make it from crops into river water, for example, whether watersheds are protected by wetlands or buffer strips of land.

John Downing, a biogeochemist and limnologist at Iowa State University, said structural issues were also to blame. Many farms in Iowa, he said, are built on former wetlands and have drains right under the crop roots that whisk water away before soils can absorb and hold on to at least some of the fertilizer. ? ?

Still, overapplication of fertilizers remains a key contributor, he said. “For farmers, the consequences of applying too little is much riskier than putting too much on.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 3, 2011

An earlier version of this article used an incorrect spelling of a chemical that runs off into rivers from crop fertilizers and animal manure. It is phosphorus, not phosphorous.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 5, 2011

A picture on Friday with an article about farm chemicals and waste that are carried south by the surging Mississippi and that are expected to result in the largest dead zone ever in the Gulf of Mexico was published in error. The picture showed volunteers sandbagging a farm south of Oslo, Minn., along the flooding Red River in April. The Red River, which flows north into Canada, is not part of the Mississippi River watershed.

View the original article here

Record Water for a Mississippi River City

He was staring at a calm puddle of water in which his house sat. A man standing beside Mr. Buck’s mailbox was casting a fishing line into a neighbor’s yard.

“It never came this far,” said Mr. Buck, a 21-year-old college student. “The farthest it ever came was the backyard of that house back there.”

The city of Vicksburg sits safely on lofty bluffs, except where it does not. The Kings neighborhood, where Mr. Buck lives in the north part of town, is one of the places where it does not.

Sunday in Kings was, for the most part, as it is in any other neighborhood, full of lawnmowers, barbecues and men standing around talking about nothing in particular. The difference was the muddy lake that was slowly consuming the neighborhood from the back.

Variances in elevation that would have gone unnoticed a few weeks ago now separate those who are nervous but dry from those whose houses are submerged nearly to the eaves. The water was not rising, residents said, so much as it was spreading, quietly. And the river that had pushed the water here was churning ferociously.

Around 10 a.m. on Sunday, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, the river broke the record elevation set here during the flood of 1927, rising to 56.3 feet, 13 feet above flood stage and 1.2 feet below the predicted crest on Thursday. It was flowing by at a rate of nearly 17 million gallons a second, which is the highest rate it is likely to reach in its entire race down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Those numbers may be nerve-racking for those along its banks, but the weekend also brought some relatively good news: the failure of a predicted rain storm to appear has resulted in a lower estimated crest downriver at Natchez.

Furthermore, the Yazoo River, engorged with Mississippi backwater, had been projected to overtop its levees at some point this weekend, flooding 285,000 acres of delta farmland and threatening some anxious country towns. But the overtopping, designed into the system as a sort of relief valve, has not happened yet.

If the Mississippi comes in a few inches lower than predicted as it passes Vicksburg, the overtopping may not happen at all.

“It’s going to be really close,” said Robert Simrall, the chief of water control for the Vicksburg district of the corps.

These yardsticks are more or less irrelevant for the residents of Kings. While the river has been indifferent to income, folding over multimillion-dollar homes and valuable farmland in the delta along with single-wide trailers in Kings, the consequences for rich and poor vary considerably.

“Out of the whole community, I would say it’s probably three families with flood insurance,” Mr. Buck said.

The worries here are as much about the water as what it will bring in the weeks it sits here. Snakes, of course. Just about everyone in the neighborhood knows someone who has recently seen an alligator, or killed one, or lost a dog to one. More acute is the worry about who might come to their homes if they have to evacuate, and what those people might do or take.

The traffic was slow along Washington Street here, as gawkers pulled off on the increasingly narrow shoulder, emerging in Sunday clothes to take pictures of an old brick church that itself was undergoing something of a full-immersion baptism.

“This is ridiculous,” said Tawanna Bush, a 36-year-old waitress at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, looking at the top third of her uncle’s house. “Is it a sign?”

“Yeah, it’s a sign,” said Jackson Floyd, 49, offering the practical fatalism of those who have known hard luck. “It’s a sign that it’s time to move and get another house.”

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting.

The Untamable Mississippi River

The rain-swollen Mississippi River crested to an all-time high last week as it surged past Cairo, Ill., exceeding the 1937 record by 2 feet. Government engineers were left with two choices: Let Cairo flood or explode a levee to save the town. They blew up the levee. But while Cairo was saved, other communities may not be so lucky.

“We’re going to fight this river all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” said Col. Vernie L. Reichling Jr. of the Army Corps of Engineers. The battle against North America’s longest river is never-ending, as The Times’s Isabel Wilkerson found in 1993, another year of record flooding.

The excerpt below is from a collection of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize.

THERE HAVE BEEN FLOODS BEFORE. People in Hannibal, Mo., or Keokuk, Iowa, or Quincy, Ill., can tell you about watching their fathers and uncles pack sandbags to protect the year’s corn crop or the feed store. For generations, some farmers figured floods and droughts into the cost of doing business. But then the country’s big plumbing system of levees and dams, made better after every flood, was supposed to keep the rivers in their place and maintain the comfortable paradox of living on a floodplain.

Now the unimaginable has happened. Across the Midwestern cornbelt it has rained in biblical proportions — 49 straight days, often in torrents. The rivers, driven past their banks, have taken back land that long ago was theirs, invading 15 million acres of farmland in eight states, forcing 36,000 people from their homes, halting river traffic for 600 miles and causing billions of dollars in damage.

From the air, from Minnesota to Missouri, from Kansas to Illinois, it looks like someone has spilled gallons and gallons of coffee on a green patchwork quilt that happens to be farms and towns. In silt rivers now wide as lakes, treetops look like bushes in a swimming pool, bridges and highways and other brave monuments to engineering are reduced to thin, threatened slivers, and even their builders know the water could take them, too, if it wanted. The floods have made the broad, S-curved Mississippi and its otherwise perfectly ordered valley look more like the Florida Keys . ...

The river, ecologists and farmers say, was never supposed to follow the tight course humans have expected it to, indeed ordered it to, with their walls of dirt and concrete levees. Of course, that has not stopped people from building homes and farms and cities along the river. The Mississippi Valley’s thick black soil is considered the richest on earth, impossible for farmers to resist.

But to claim the land meant making a bargain with the river, confining it to an artificially narrow path so that farms could reach as far as the shore and places like New Orleans and St. Louis could live undisturbed while their goods were carried safely from port to port. The price that river people pay is sudden and catastrophic flooding when excess rainwater, forced into a narrow channel by the levees, runs out of places to go and cannot drain naturally into the soil. ...

The great lesson of the floods may be that humans will have to do a lot more if they are to outwit nature, if that is even possible.

ISABEL WILKERSON