Toxin-laden drinking water from Lake Erie forced Toledo, Ohio, officials to issue a city-wide ban for its more than half-million residents last week, and while the ban is now lifted, concerns about the most likely cause, massive blue-green algae blooms, remain. In 2012, an in-depth piece that award-winning science reporter Jessica Marshall wrote for the Food & Environment Reporting Network pointed to one important, but reassuring, claim by scientists: Unlike many environmental problems, this issue can be fixed fairly quickly.
The story was first published by our media partner the Center for Investigative Reporting. Marshall also assisted in a joint investigation with ABC News correspondent Jim Avila, whose story aired on World News Tonight. (ABC News cited the investigation again in recent coverage of Toledo’s water woes.) Both 2012 pieces pointed out that the blooms pose serious health threats and are cutting into fishing and tourism industries, on which many lake communities around the country greatly depend.
The algae blooms have become a common late-summer occurrence across the nation, producing toxins that are harmful to people and other animals that drink or contact the water. Marshall spoke with many experts from Ohio, where the problem has been particularly troublesome. Jeffrey Reutter, director of the Stone Laboratory at The Ohio State University, told Marshall that he’s seen the blooms increase on Lake Erie since the mid-1990s. Marshall pointed out that in 2011, a record-setting bloom on Lake Erie forced the city of Toledo to “spend an extra $3,000 to $4,000 a day treating the drinking water it drew from the lake.”
Experts agree that fertilizer and animal waste runoff from farms are the primary source of the problem. Nutrient-rich material, particularly phosphorous, combined with stagnant water and increasingly hot temperatures, spurred by global warming, create the perfect conditions for blue-green algae blooms. In addition, Marshall pointed out, “Flows from sewage treatment plants and urban storm drains, runoff from lakeside lawns, and discharges from industries such as pulp and paper mills can also contribute phosphorus to streams and lakes.”
Marshall reported that newer techniques, such as applying fertilizer and animal waste during the winter when the ground is frozen and easier to drive equipment over, may be adding to the problem. Additionally, Marshall says researchers have recently found that “drainage tile systems beneath fields—an increasingly popular method for improving crop growth that keeps fields from becoming soggy after rains—may contribute as much as half the dissolved phosphorus that comes off of a given field.”
So how can this problem be fixed? Reutter told Marshall that studies show mixing fertilizer into the soil can reduce runoff by 50 percent and that no-till farming, in which plowing is minimized, can reduce sediment runoff by a third. Earlier this week in an interview with NPR reporter Linda Werthheimer, USDA expert Steve Davis was quick to point out that farmers are working hard to reduce runoff and many are using high-tech “precision” tools to manage fertilizer application. Using GPS devices and soil samples pinpointed by satellite in their fields, farmers can deposit the exact amount of fertilizer that the soil can absorb, thereby reducing the chance of runoff.
Many farmers in Ohio are concerned that they may be unfairly blamed for Lake Erie’s algae blooms and that lawmakers will pass knee-jerk reactionary rules and regulations. The Ohio Farm Bureau quickly released a statement on Monday saying:
“Ohio’s agriculture community has been focusing on finding ways to keep nutrients in place on farms by preventing runoff. For several years Ohio’s agriculture community has been meeting and working together on various projects that address water quality challenges. For example, Ohio farmers have invested more than $1 million of their own money for on-farm research to seek solutions to runoff problems.”
The Bureau went on to say that Ohio’s agriculture community supports Senate Bill 150, which would require most farmers to be certified to apply fertilizer. According to the Columbus Dispatch, one large concern is that the bill excludes the application of animal waste.
Marshall reported in 2012 that “Dunn County, Wisconsin, which includes Lake Menomin and Tainter Lake, both notorious for their blooms, just [in 2012] passed a controversial ordinance requiring all waterfront property, including agricultural lands, to maintain an un-mowed 35-foot-deep buffer strip along the water’s edge—a key strategy, experts agree, to soak up the runoff before it reaches the water. In addition, Wisconsin recently passed legislation to control phosphorus.”
Tom Quinn, Executive Director of Wisconsin Farmers Union told Marshall, “There isn’t any one particular strategy that is going to solve this problem for every farm but each farm has a set of things that they should be doing to protect the water around them but also to protect their own soil. You need some kind of a system that encourages farmers in doing that. That’s really going to be the next step.”
Marshall shared with us some of Quinn’s ideas about alternatives to government regulation, which didn’t make it into her original piece. He discussed the launch of a five-year project that focuses on offering farmers incentives to reduce phosphorus loads in specific watersheds in counties throughout Wisconsin. Quinn said, “We’ll begin working with those farmers to organize into a watershed organization and ask them to identify as a group the conservation practices that make the most sense for their group, and we’ll be raising money to pay [farmer incentives] for those.” He said the collaborative approach can be more effective than government regulations and that “the EPA is allowing states to experiment with a nutrient trading system.”
Such measures could also reduce “dead zones,” which James Beard Award-winning author Paul Greenberg wrote about in a FERN sponsored piece published by our media partner The American Prospect last year. Dead zones, which occur primarily in saltwater, suck the oxygen out of the water, suffocating fish and plankton and wreaking havoc on sensitive ecosystems. Interestingly, excess nitrogen is the primary culprit for dead zones and excess phosphorous for algae blooms. The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone, caused by excess nutrients from Midwest agriculture coming down the Mississippi river, is now the size of Connecticut.
Since most fertilizers contain both phosphorous and nitrogen, reducing the 1.7 million tons of fertilizer runoff each year from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico can reduce or eliminate the second-largest dead zone in the world. As Greenberg discussed, the Black Sea dead zone—then the world’s largest—vanished in the 1990s when the Iron Curtain countries bordering the Danube River collapsed and fertilizer subsidies fell.
Patrick “Buzz” Sorge of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources may have said it the best when he told Marshall, “We know what it takes to fix this stuff. We just have to find the social and political will to get this done.”