nitrogen runoff

Four of every 10 miles of U.S. rivers and streams are in poor condition because of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, said the EPA in its latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment.

Meat and poultry processing plants would reduce their emissions of water pollutants, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, by 100 million pounds annually under proposed wastewater rules, said the Environmental Protection Agency. It would be the first update of effluent limitation guidelines in a generation.

In a new report, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation calls on farms in the bay’s watershed to “urgently accelerate and scale up” their conservation efforts, not only to reduce water-borne pollution — a federal mandate — but to slash their greenhouse gas emissions and stoke local economies.

Agricultural intensification and a lack of regulations drove a 78-percent increase in the farm sector’s ammonia emissions between 1980 and 2018, according to a paper published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. 

Corn growers in 11 states can apply for crop insurance coverage this year for a practice that reduces nutrient runoff, said the Risk Management Agency on Wednesday. The policy will cover yield losses if bad weather prevents growers from making multiple applications of nitrogen fertilizer during key parts of the growing season.

The presidents of six state farm bureaus asked the USDA to share the cost with farmers of reducing sediment and nutrient runoff into Chesapeake Bay. "We are now at a critical stage in the Chesapeake Bay cleanup," with a 2025 deadline for reducing pollution, said the farm leaders in a letter.

Last summer, researchers from Mars Inc. and UC Davis announced the "discovery" of a variety of corn grown in Oaxaca that fixes its own nitrogen through mucus-covered aerial roots. Their study, in the journal PLOS Biology, touched off a debate—in Mexico and beyond—about the effectiveness of global policies designed to safeguard the genetic resources of indigenous communities, according to FERN's latest story, published with Yale Environment 360.

Some 1,700 U.S. communities have worrisomely high levels of nitrate in their water supplies, and two-thirds of those communities, serving more than 3 million people, have no treatment system to remove it, said an Environmental Working Group report released today.

The USDA says there is now enough room in the Conservation Reserve that, for the first time in months, it will accept applications for high-priority stewardship projects, such as filter strips, that prevent erosion and maintain water quality on fragile land. Enrollment runs from today through Aug. 17 for the practices, which require comparatively small amounts of land.

Fertilizer runoff could be reduced significantly if row crops such as corn and soybeans are replaced with perennial grasses harvested for biofuel production, say researchers from four Midwestern universities. Nitrogen runoff in the Mississippi River basin, blamed for creation of a "dead zone" each summer in the Gulf of Mexico, could drop 15-20 percent if switchgrass or miscanthus were planted on a quarter of the land now devoted to row crops, according to computer simulations.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service is on a nationwide mission to train farmers to protect the microorganisms in soil—and their relationship to crops— instead of destroying them with fertilizer and chemical sprays, says an Orion Magazine story produced with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

"Scientists in the Chesapeake Bay have been looking at nutrient budgets for close to three decades. But to date, no state has implemented one .... Nevertheless, the idea continues to percolate," reports the Bay Journal, ahead of a Chesapeake Bay Summit to be broadcast on Maryland Public Television on Wednesday.

Nutrient runoff is a growing problem in many parts of the United States but researchers from the University of Rhode Island say beavers could be an ally in reducing nitrogen runoff that can lead to low-oxygen "dead zones,” says the American Society of Agronomy.

Researchers know that a comparatively small share of cropland accounts for a disproportionate amount of erosion and nutrient runoff, writes economist Marc Ribaudo in Choices, the ag econ journal.

The U.S. Geological Survey says "excess fertilizer and manure applied to the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore are causing poor-quality water flows in streams that flow into the bay."

Trustees of the Des Moines Water Works voted at the end of a 60-day warning period to sue drainage districts in three counties in northwest Iowa over high levels of nitrate in the Raccoon River, a source of drinking water for Iowa's capital city.