The USDA will invest $41 million over three years to clean up the Western Lake Erie Basin, which supplies water to farmers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced this week. The funds come on top of $36 million already allocated to the area through the farm bill, and are meant to help farmers adopt conservation tools to limit agricultural runoff.
With the new funding, “Farmers and landowners will be able to add conservation measures to about 870,000 acres in this critical watershed, effectively doubling the acres of conservation treatment that can be accomplished in the three years,” said Vilsack.
USDA conservation contracts in the Western Lake Erie Basin already cover 580,000 acres. The agency’s National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) estimates that “7 million pounds of nitrogen, 1.2 million pounds of phosphorous, and 488,000 tons of sediment” were saved in the basin between 2009 and 2014. And a new report by NRCS predicts that a further 640,000 pounds of phosphorous runoff from farms and more than 260,000 tons of sediment loss will be stopped over the course of the next three-year period.
Lake Erie has been plagued by toxic algae blooms in recent years, due to a combination of climate change and farm runoff. In 2014, a bloom forced Toledo to shut off its drinking water, which comes from the lake. Lake Erie supplies water to 11 million people. A study by Ohio State University late last year said that algae blooms in Lake Erie could double over the next hundred years, largely because of warmer temperatures. The study argued that reducing phosphorous runoff by as much as 40 percent (the amount that Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario, Canada, have pledged to reduce over the next 10 years) might not be enough to prevent the algae, because “climate change supercharges algae the way anabolic steroids supercharge athletes,” Noel Aloysius, a postdoctoral researcher, told Ohio State University News.