The chemical industry is a cornerstone of modern American farming. It helps grow the food billions of people eat. It’s also causing vast environmental damage. In this episode of REAP/SOW, produced in collaboration with WWNO’s Sea Change podcast, you’re going to hear the story of synthetic fertilizer, and how this powerful concoction of chemicals has radically reshaped how we farm and what we eat – and how it’s poisoning communities, upending livelihoods, and choking the life out of a huge swath of the ocean. Reported by Garrett Hazelwood and Eric Schmid, hosted by WWNO’s Carlyle Calhoun and FERN’s Teresa Cotsirilos.
TRANSCRIPT:
Teresa Cotsirilos: You’re listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Every summer, a “dead zone” forms in the Gulf of Mexico. That means the oxygen levels in teh water are so low that most fish and marine life will die there. This “dead zone” is big. Last year? It was the size of New Jersey. And we know what’s creating it: the massive farms that line the Mississippi and its many tributaries, which rely on chemical fertilizers.
The amount of synthetic fertilizer that American farmers use per acre has sky rocketed since 1960. And that excess fertilizer can run off into our rivers and waterways, poisoning communities and ecosystems.
FERN contributors Garrett Hazelwood and Eric Schmid just published a great story about this. He produced it in collaboration with our friends at WWNO’s Sea Change podcast. I’ll let Garrett take it from here.
Garrett Hazelwood: Convent, Louisiana, is a narrow strip of land on the East Bank of St. James Parish, a bend in the river. Just a few clusters of modest houses with big lawns alongside sugarcane fields. This small town is about an hour upriver from New Orleans. The community is majority Black, and many here can trace their roots to ancestors who are enslaved on nearby plantations.
Barbara Washington: My great grandmother, great-great-great grandmother, in 1874, she came out of slavery and she purchased 34 acres of land.
Garrett: Barbara Washington is in her early 70s. She’s wearing blue jeans and rectangular glasses. It’s only 9:00 a.m., but the sun rose hours ago, like an oven door opening, and the sky is so blue, it hurts to look at.
It’s late summer, and the sugarcane is well over our heads. But beyond it, just a few hundred yards from us, is the land Barbara’s family has been cultivating for generations. She points to it.
Barbara: That land is right over here, and it still is in our family. It’s 150 years old.
Garrett: To our left across the two lane road and the levee beside it is the river that built this place. And I mean that literally. The land we’re standing on, like all the land in southern Louisiana, was carried here as sediment by the Mississippi River. The whole area is barely above sea level, and yet about two miles behind us is something you just don’t see in this part of the country.
Barbara: It looks like a big mountain.
Garrett: A mountain in a floodplain, and that mountain, well, it’s laced with poison. It’s a mountain of radioactive waste left over from the production of fertilizer, and it’s right there beside fields where food is grown, just down the road from Barbara’s house and the park beside it where children play.
Carlyle Calhoun: That’s investigative journalist Garrett Hazelwood. The chemical industry is big business of Louisiana. Companies here manufacture plastics, fuels, pesticides, and cleaning products, but one part of the chemical industry that’s often overlooked is the fertilizer business. Chemical fertilizer is a cornerstone of modern farming.
It helps grow the food and food products billions of people eat. It’s also causing vast environmental damage. I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change.
Today you’re going to hear the story of modern fertilizer. And how this powerful concoction of chemicals has radically reshaped how we farm and what we eat, and how it’s poisoning communities, upending livelihoods, and choking the life out of a huge swath of the ocean. In this episode, we follow the journey of fertilizer from Louisiana to the Midwest, then back down along the Mississippi River to a place it creates in the Gulf, a place called the dead zone. Coming up, Garrett Hazelwood starts us off with a chemistry lesson.
Garrett: To understand how Barbara Washington came to have that mountain of toxic waste near her home, you need to know a few things about the modern fertilizer industry. First, there are three main nutrients that plants need, often abbreviated as NPK. The N is nitrogen, the P is phosphorus, and the K is potassium.
Farmers today often use a combination of all three. But the one they use the most of is nitrogen. But that’s a relatively new development because there used to be a limited amount of nitrogen available in nature. See, for thousands of years, farmers have known that when they take nutrients out of their soil by harvesting crops, they have to put nutrients back in.
So they replenished their fields using what was at hand. They spread animal manure and they allowed plants to grow and die and return to the soil, both of which replenished the fields with NPK. Things more or less continued that way until the early 1900s, when demand for nitrogen skyrocketed. That happened because nitrogen does more than make powerful fertilizer.
It also makes powerful explosives.
Newscaster: The First World War is fought on a scale never before seen in the whole of human history.
Garrett: When World War I broke out, countries at war in Europe needed nitrogen to bomb their enemies, and the competition over the world’s few nitrogen deposits became intense, which is why it was so world changing when German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to pull nitrogen directly from the air to turn it from a gas that’s plentiful in Earth’s atmosphere into a solid or liquid. That.. process yields a form of nitrogen called ammonia. And after Haber’s invention, Germany started churning out tens of thousands of tons of ammonia.
The U.S. had to catch up. Here’s President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.
President Roosevelt: We must increase production facilities for everything needed for the Army and Navy for national defense.
Garrett: During World War IIi, the U.S. built a bunch of new ammonia plants so it could mass-produce munitions, and after the war, when all that ammonia was no longer needed for bombs, chemical companies were left with a surplus and they needed new buyers.
They began marketing their ammonia to farmers.
Newscaster: America needs good fertilizers to help build a strong agriculture for the future.
Garrett: American farmers went from using almost no chemical fertilizer in the 1930s to almost 50 pounds per acre by 1960. Four decades after that, farmers had tripled that number, going from about 50 to 150 pounds per acre.
But using all that fertilizer came with a cost. We started this story in Louisiana, where chemical fertilizer is being made and where companies making that fertilizer load it onto barges, freight ships, trains, and into pipelines that spider-web across the country. So now we’re going to trace just one of the routes that fertilizer takes when it leaves Louisiana.
My colleague Eric Schmid, a reporter in St. Louis, is going to take us upriver to a farm in the Midwest. In his reporting, Eric found that the dramatic spike in the use of agricultural chemicals means many farmers today can’t go without them. It’s just a part of staying in business
Eric Schmid: Like Garrett said, here in the Midwest, synthetic fertilizer is a part of life for farmers, like Doug Downs.
Doug Downs: Corn will grow without applied nitrogen. It just won’t grow and produce as well without additionally supplied nitrogen.
Eric: Doug is tall and stocky with short brown hair and an infectious smile. He’s been farming for decades, and these days grows about 2,000 acres of mostly corn and soybeans in central Illinois, about halfway between St. Louis and Chicago. And that applied nitrogen, well, for Doug, it’s nonnegotiable.
Doug: I need that nitrogen. I gotta have it. Now, I don’t wanna apply too much.
Eric: Doug has good reasons not to use too much nitrogen, and we’ll get to that. But first, let’s talk about how chemical fertilizers are important for something called yield.
Yield is the corn, soy, or whatever crop that comes off the field each year. What a farmer sells to make money to keep the farm afloat. Chemical fertilizer, nitrogen, helps increase that yield.
Doug: No farmer ever wants to run out of nitrogen, you know. You always want to make sure you got enough, and people overapply nitrogen for that reason.
I mean, that is true, that does happen. Don’t want to sacrifice yield.
Eric: For decades, farmers have been nudged by market forces and government policies to increase their yields. Drive through America’s Breadbasket today, and the view is pretty much the same, no matter if you’re on a highway or bumpy county road: seemingly endless fields of soy and corn, which makes things like corn chips, one of my favorite road trip snacks. These days, more than 80 percent of the corn and soy the U.S. produces comes from this part of the country. We’re talking more than a hundred million acres dedicated to just two crops. But the vast majority of it doesn’t become chips or soy milk. It goes to animal feed, or in the case of corn, ethanol fuel.
Chemicals — pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and nitrogen — helped remake America’s Breadbasket to look this way, but there are trade-offs. Using chemical fertilizer on the same fields over and over degrades the soil’s health. So farmers have had to use more and more of it over time. On top of that, fertilizer is expensive.
I guess how many thousands of dollars do you spend on nitrogen a year?
Doug: You mean hundreds of thousands? I couldn’t tell, you know, in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars just for me, my little …
Eric: A hundred thousand dollars just for fertilizer. And that doesn’t even account for some of nitrogen’s other costs.
The price we pay when it runs off the fields where it’s applied, which a broad consensus of scientists says happens to around half the fertilizer that’s used around the globe. Point is, Doug has good reason to use less fertilizer.
Doug: Yes. Flat out, yes. I’m going to reduce my nitrogen usage next year.
Eric: Doug’s part of a program which offers cash incentives in exchange for trying a slew of farming methods aimed at keeping nitrogen and phosphorus from leaving his fields. And Doug volunteered to join this program so he could make changes on his terms, before anyone forced him to.
Doug: How can we avert government regulations, because we don’t want that.
Eric: Neither do lobbyists from the fossil fuel and agricultural industries. For decades, they’ve fought hard against new regulations, including those related to climate issues, often citing economic reasons. One lobbying organization, the American Farm Bureau, even called for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980.
And all this activism has paid off. There aren’t any national regulations regarding nitrogen use by farmers, and there likely won’t be any anytime soon. No sticks. Instead, the government relies on carrots, a menu of carrots, scores of grants, all aimed to entice farmers to either use less fertilizer or keep it from running off their fields.
But the problem is these carrots aren’t making much of a dent. For one, very few farmers are biting. Doug is an outlier because he’s willing to voluntarily change how he farms. And the program he’s in, like most government farming programs, promotes using another kind of fertilizer, something called cover crops.
Doug: It piqued my interest. I’m, you know, hey, can I grow my nitrogen source without having to actually buy synthetic nitrogen.
Eric: Synthetic nitrogen, in case the name isn’t clear enough, is the stuff that companies manufacture specifically to fertilize crops. What comes from those industrial facilities in Louisiana.
Cover crops do the same thing, but naturally, and they’re actually not all that new. Farmers used them for centuries before chemical fertilizer burst onto the scene. These plants — cereal rye, winter wheat, hairy vetch, and many others — cover a farmer’s field in the winter, the time of year when they can’t grow cash crops like corn and soy.
They capture excess nitrogen leftover in the soil that could otherwise run off during rainstorms. Some cover crops even pull nitrogen out of the air and store it in their roots. All this captured nitrogen remains available for future crops But most cover crops don’t find as much nitrogen as a farmer can get with applying synthetic fertilizer.
Doug has cover crops on about a quarter of his acres, but with no cattle eating them, they’re too expensive to put on all his fields, even with incentives. But he’s always checking out how his neighbors use them.
Doug: I drive around in the dead of winter looking at cover crops, and I pay attention to what other people do and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
Eric: One day it might be profitable to put cover crops on all his acreage, but for now, he still relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, especially one called anhydrous ammonia, which is what’s made when you pull nitrogen directly from the air. The process that Garrett mentioned. Doug injects anhydrous ammonia into his fields.
Doug: Some people won’t use it. It’s dangerous, it’s hard to handle, but it is the most widely used nitrogen source. Eric: It’s also the cheapest nitrogen source because it’s shipped via pipeline from where it’s made, including Louisiana, to a facility not far from Doug’s farmland. But the cost of Doug’s nitrogen can jump around.
Like a few years ago when the price dropped in half. It was fall. Not the perfect time of year to fertilize, but the price was right.
Doug: The problem is that we had to take delivery of that nitrogen, essentially apply it in the fall. We can’t store it unless you have humongous, gigantic on-farm storage tanks, which is just absolutely impractical.
Eric: So Doug injected the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer into the soil many months before the growing season, which means with every rain and melting snow, some of that nitrogen left his fields and entered the watershed.
Doug: How can I, as a businessman, not buy an input for half the cost andjust ignore — how can I ignore that?
Eric Also hard to ignore is how much fertilizer washes off Midwestern farms and travels down the Mississippi River. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a national science-based nonprofit, estimates the amount of runoff is equivalent to 3,000 shipping containers of nitrogen being dumped into the Gulf each year, every year since 1980.
When I called Doug up recently, he told me he was still committed to using less chemical fertilizer. This year, for example, he’s putting it on his fields much closer to the planting season. As much as Doug may want to cut back on chemical fertilizers, it has to work financially. His farm has to stay solvent.
Doug: My definition of sustainability is staying in business and putting my kids through school and making my mortgage payments and making my farm payments. You know, I certainly don’t want to pollute my water.
Eric: He says no farmer wants that. But Doug and so many farmers like him are locked into this system. They have to use chemical fertilizer to make ends meet. But what goes upriver inevitably comes back downriver, and it comes with costs, ones that aren’t measured in dollars or cents.
Coming up, Garrett Hazelwood picks up the story where we started this episode where the fertilizer that feeds Midwestern crops is manufactured — and strangling Louisiana communities and ecosystems all the way down to the dead zone in the Gulf.
Garrett: The kind of farming that Doug Downs does, it’s business, but it’s probably not what you think when you hear the word “farm.” You probably picture something more like how Barbara Washington grew up. You met Barbara earlier pointing to the land her family has lived on for 150 years.
Barbara: My grandfather had a garden.He had me on a little tractor riding and we had mustard greens and that were good mustard greens. I mean, you know, everybody …
Garrett: They kept chickens and ducks. Barbara picked figs and made jam. She harvested pecans to sell for pocket money. But then, when she was in high school, in the 1960s, construction began on a fertilizer plant down the road from her family’s land, a phosphorus fertilizer plant to be exact — the P in our NPK..
The production process the company uses creates about five tons of waste for every one ton of product. So the company piled up the waste, a hazardous material called phosphogypsum, b,ehind the facility creating their toxic mountain in the floodplain. And meanwhile, more fertilizer and petrochemical companies opened other facilities nearby. Those two industries, by the way, chemical fertilizer and oil and gas, are deeply intertwined. Fertilizer companies use gas to produce ammonia, making them some of the biggest buyers of American gas. As all these chemical plants moved to town, Barbara watched that mountain of toxic waste from the fertilizer plant grow taller. She watched the pecan and fig trees disappear.
She saw her garden produce less and less food. She saw her friends and relatives move away. Fifty years on, the little stretch of river where she lives is now a place where more chemical fertilizer is produced than anywhere else in the United States. That pile of toxic waste, now owned by a company called Mosaic, has become a roughly 200-foot-tall mountain with a toxic lake inside it. Kind of like a volcano.
The base of the volcano is nearly two miles wide and a mile long.
Newscaster: It’s one of the tallest places in Louisiana, a 200-foot-tall reservoir. And what it’s typically holding back is about 800 million gallons of acidic waste.
Garrett: And did I mention it’s radioactive? That’s because there are trace amounts of radium in uranium that are naturally present in the phosphate rock that Mosaic mines.
The company refines them out but then dumps them all together in its toxic pile. Those radioactive heavy metals decay into a radioactive gas called radon, which according to the EPA is the country’s second leading cause of lung cancer. And the structure itself, filled with a lake that has at times held over a billion gallons of acid water, it’s just not very stable.
Similar toxic mountains at other fertilizer facilities in Florida have sprung massive leaks causing numerous environmental catastrophes.
Newscaster: Tonight, there are reports of millions of gallons of contaminated water now flowing into the Florida aquifer.
Newscaster: Today, Manatee County declared a state of emergency.
Newscaster: Millions of gallons of sludgy acidic wastewater emptied into Archie Creek Canal and surrounding wetlands.
Garrett: The EPA regulates these mountains of fertilizer waste. But in 2019, the ground at the base of the mountain by Barbara’s house began to buckle, threatening to spill its toxic lake across the community. The earth heaved up in a scar nearly half a mile long. Emergency crews were able to stop the stack from collapsing, but it was a close call, and the mountain has only grown since then.
As we’re standing at the edge of that sugarcane field down the street from Barbara’s family land, an SUV pulls into the driveway beside us and Gail Leboeuf gets out.
She has gray hair and brown eyes that don’t seem to miss much. Gail and Barbara, invite me into a single-story brick house.
It’s headquarters for the organization they cofounded, Inclusive Louisiana, which works to educate and mobilize the community against threats from industrial pollution. In the living room, there’s a stack of buckets filled with hurricane relief supplies they’ll be handing out to their neighbors and two folding tables. Gail sorts through some papers and lays a map on the table.
Gail Leboeuf: See, this map shows you where the people live among the industry.
Garrett: What she’s showing me is the huge number of industrial facilities that have been built throughout her community. According to EPA data, a few of the facilities responsible for some of the worst pollution are making fertilizer. The toxic mountain is a couple miles southeast of where we’re sitting.
A few miles to the northwest, the same company, Mosaic, has another facility, and 15 miles upriver, there’s yet another toxic mountain of radioactive waste. And that’s just the plants producing phosphorus fertilizer. Across the river, in a city called Donaldsonville, is what the company that operates it, CF Industries, touts as the world’s largest ammonia-producing complex.
The EPA also calls it the number one carbon polluter in the entire state of Louisiana. And to put that in context, about a quarter of all countries have a lower emissions footprint than that one plant. Oh, and the facility with that toxic mountain by Barbara’s house, they’re looking to expand.
Gail: Now they want to build another gypsum stack.
Start another one, 200 foot high. Lord have mercy.
Garrett: Barbara says the fertilizer and other petrochemical plants are the reason that living off the land as her family did for over a century is no longer an option. Some of her neighbors are afraid to go outside and breathe the air. They don’t dare drink the well water.
The place where they live has a nickname now.
Newscasters: Cancer Alley. Cancer Alley.
Barbara: This is Cancer Alley.
Garrett: But Barbara and Gail, they’re fighting back. Their organization is suing St. James Parish to stop local officials from permitting the construction of additional polluting facilities, arguing that zoning laws have disproportionately harmed Black neighborhoods. Local and state officials meanwhile have long celebrated the companies responsible for the pollution.
Bobby Jindal: This is a great, great day for our, our parish. Let’s give the folks of Mosaic a great round of applause for choosing Louisiana.
Garrett: That’s former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in 2012, standing with the parish president, announcing that Mosaic intended to build a new ammonia plant in St. James Parish. You hear this a lot in Louisiana.
Petrochemical companies spewing pollution are good for the local economy.
Jeff Landry: This is what winning looks like in Louisiana.
Garrett: In 2025, Governor Jeff Landry continued the tradition, proudly announcing CF Industries will expand its nitrogen plant in Donaldsonville. Around Convent, industrial plants owned by multinational corporations are everywhere, and bars, restaurants, and the kind of businesses where local people can buy clothes, groceries, or school supplies for their children? Not so much.
Barbara: We don’t have a major store. We don’t have a gas station. You know, from the Sunshine Bridge to the Veterans Memorial Bridge, we can’t buy a decent pair of shoes.
Garrett: And yet the CEOs of Mosaic and CF industries both make about $12 million a year. Meanwhile, according to the company’s website, the majority of workers at the CF Industries plant — remember, Louisiana’s biggest polluter — are hired as contractors, meaning they aren’t given the benefits or job security that full-time employees would get.
Gail: The plants are the new plantations of the South. They’re still using the same people the same way for revenue that they did during slavery.
Garrett: We reached out to Mosaic and CF Industries multiple times for comment. A Mosaic representative said they were unable to respond in time for publication. We never heard back from CF Industries. It’s a dark irony that the fertilizer companies whose products help create abundance elsewhere are draining the life out of Convent.
But Convent is just the epicenter. Because the chemical fertilizer that’s manufactured in Cancer Alley, it leaves, and thousands of farmers like Doug Downs put those chemicals into the soil. And then it rains. The chemicals wash into streams and creeks that flow into the Mississippi River, and so much of the chemical fertilizer winds up right back where it started:in Louisiana, way down at the bottom of the state, where the river meets the sea.
Thomas Olander: I fish these waters since 1978, so what’s that, 45, 46 years now, I’ve been fishing this water.
Garrett: Thomas Olander is a shrimper. His grandfather was a shrimper. His father was a shrimper. His brother is a shrimper. His wife’s a shrimper, too.
It’s a windy day, and he’s standing on the deck of his boat in the marina at Cypremort Point, a peninsula right in the middle of the arch of Louisiana’s boot, explaining that shrimping isn’t just a job for him, it’s part of his heritage and his culture. Not so long ago, it was the lifeblood of his community.
Thomas: Back in the ’80s, ’90s, you couldn’t fit another boat in this bayou.
Garrett: Those were the boom times. Louisiana’s shrimping and shellfish industry in the mid to late ’90s brought in about $2 billion a year for the state economy. But now the marina is quiet.
Thomas: And we are down to two fishermen. This boat and that boat. That’s it. All these others …
Garrett: The boat he points to in the next slip is his brother’s. Thomas’ own boat is called the Tommy Boy, named for his son, who’s going out on fishing trips on it since before he was old enough to walk. So Tommy Jr. captains his own shrimp boat.
Thomas: He’s very good at what he does. He really is. I mean, I better do everything I can to beat him, I mean, to tell you everything I can.
Garrett: And yet, Thomas Sr. worries there might not be another generation of shrimpers in the family. Between 2001 and 2018, the number of shrimpers fishing in Louisiana has declined by well over half. That decline has happened for several reasons.
A flood of cheap imports have caused the price of shrimp to plummet. The cost of fuel has gone up, and the Gulf is changing. The abundance that Thomas and his family have relied on is in jeopardy. For at least a decade now, Thomas has known that something isn’t right. He says the shrimp aren’t growing to the same size as they used to.
Thomas: The water’s just not good. The water is polluted. It’s just a real polluted water now.
Garrett: He’s right about the pollution. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found that all those chemicals washing down from the Midwest are having an effect. Lately, Thomas has been seeing it on the surface: thick mats of water lilies clogging up the fishing grounds, making it hard for him to dip his nets.
Thomas: We’re so inundated with water lilies now like we’ve never been before, and it has to be from that fertilizer that’s getting that stuff to grow like, like crazy now.
Garrett: Whether you apply it to agricultural fields or to the ocean, fertilizer will do what fertilizer does best: make plants grow. Those water lilies are just the tip of the iceberg, and Thomas isn’t the only one interested in what fertilizer pollution is doing to the Gulf.
Cassie Glaspie: I’m Dr. Cassie Glaspie. I am at Louisiana State University, and I’m an assistant professor of marine science.
Garrett: Dr. Glaspie leads a team of researchers documenting the effects that fertilizer pollution is having on marine life. Each summer, she and her team take a boat named the Pelican, a big research ship outfitted with scientific equipment, and they motor out into the Gulf.
Cassie: About 17 meters.
Garrett: They work around the clock, day shifts and night shifts. They have this six-foot-tall array of scientific instruments that are all bolted together in a big cylinder called a CTD. It collects water samples and data on things like temperature, salinity, and oxygen levels that help reveal how fertilizer is changing the ecosystem.
The Pelican travels a vast area between Alabama and Texas, collecting data points, gradually building a map, dot by dot, of something that can’t be seen with a naked eye. Something enormous. Sometimes at night they lower the CTD into schools of little ocean critters called bioluminescent zooplankton.
Cassie: And they flash, kind of like fireflies. They respond to disturbance.
So you’ll be looking over the side of the boat, and you’ll see hundreds of little sparks of like whitish-blue light just below the surface.
Garrett: As the equipment goes down, Dr. Glaspie sits in a control room watching the data coming in from the sensors and one sensor in particular, the one that shows oxygen levels in the water. It starts to drop — fast.
Cassie: That little line is graphing lower and lower and lower.
Garrett: Meaning there’s less and less oxygen in the water, and where there’s not enough oxygen in the water, fish and other marine life can’t survive. Those conditions mean that Dr. Glaspie and her team have found what they’re looking for. Not the presence of fertilizer pollution, but its result.
People call it the dead zone, a vast area of water. You can think of it as a giant three-dimensional blob in which oxygen levels are so low that almost nothing can live.
Cassie: It even goes down to zero, and that’s kind of heartbreaking because there’s really nothing but bacteria that can live in those conditions.
Garrett: The species hit hardest are the ones that live on the ocean floor. The oysters, the clams, the crabs …
Cassie:, The poor worms. You know, I’m a pretty empathetic …
Garrett: The poor worms. The dead zone forms because when nitrogen and phosphorus reach the Gulf, they make plants grow. According to the EPA, most of that nitrogen and phosphorus comes from fertilizer.
Earlier, shrimper Thomas Olander talked about water lilies, but the much bigger problem is the far tinier ocean plants that multiply in huge numbers and then die and sink to the bottom. Those dead plants are a feast for bacteria. The bacteria population explodes and sucks all the oxygen out of the water.
When that happens, all the other species in the area are either forced to flee or die. That’s why the bottom dwellers are hit hardest, and that includes one of the bottom dwellers that people in Louisiana rely on for their livelihoods: shrimp.
Cassie: there’s low dissolved oxygen water at the bottom, that dead zone sitting at the bottom, those shrimp aren’t going to be able to survive there.
Garrett: Which is one reason Thomas Olander’s son might be the last generation of shrimpers in his family.
The bigger the dead zone, the smaller the fishing grounds.
Cassie: It almost makes me feel suffocated when I think about what the conditions are at the bottom of the water column in some of these areas.
Garrett: Dr. Glaspie and her team motor across the Gulf. They drop their equipment over and over to figure out how big the dead zone is — and it is big. It spans millions of acres. The measures being taken to try and shrink it, they aren’t making a dent. As we saw with Doug Downs, farmers have few resources available to help them stem the pollution and even fewer regulations nudging them to change.
In fact, many government incentives encourage farmers and chemical fertilizer companies to keep doing business as usual. And so year after year, massive amounts of fertilizer pollution keep winding up in the Gulf. The scale of pollution is staggering. Some years the dead zone is almost as big as the state of New Jersey, and I want to pause on that fact to really let it sink in.
Because imagine if this was happening on land. If every summer, all the oxygen was sucked out of over 5 million acres. If every worm, butterfly, squirrel, dog, deer, and person across an area as big as New Jersey had to flee gasping for their lives or die, because that is what we’re doing to the ocean.
That is the cost of chemical fertilizer.
Teresa: This story was produced in collaboration with Sea Change. It also had support from the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. The story was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and reported by Garrett Hazelwood and Eric Schmid. It was edited by Eve Abrams, with additional help from Carlyle Calhoun, Eva Tessify, Ryan Vazquez, Theodore Ross, and Brent Cunningham. The story was factchecked by Naomi Barr.
REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner is the producer and video producer for REAP/SOW. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.