Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes | Hacker News Reader

Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes

nationalgeographic.com

I'm deeply blessed to live on and own ~100ft of Lake Erie's shoreline. I can hear her waves now. Like all the Great Lakes, she is an inland ocean, enormous, inviting the misapprehension that she will dilute an infinite amount of anything you could drain into her. Alas, around here we know the history: not that long ago the surface of Lake Erie caught on fire and no one could figure out how to put it out. So let's remember that we're doing better than we once did. My backyard is daily frequented by bald eagles chasing one another. The place is in many ways healthy.

At the same time, it's quite clear that it's still not good enough - particularly the algae blooms centering on the mouth of the Maumee river (near Toledo) which turn miles of the lake into something looking and feeling like bright green paint every so often. It doesn't come near my place, but you can imagine how I feel when I picture a hundred square miles of toxic green sludge, juxtaposed with Michigan and Ohio Republican politicians proposing "self-regulation" as the solution...

I live quite close to you, fellow Ontarian here. Windsor is where I call home. I plan one day to own a house on the lake, nothing else like it.

I'm a Michigander - across the water from Amherstburg and a tick south.

Cant you just say "the waves"? Calling it "her" once is fine, but four times is creepy.

It's weird to say 'her' once and then switch pronouns. But I hear you. You're picturing me with a peg leg. :)

Here's an HNer who knows that gendered pronouns exist for many inanimate nouns, and thinks that it's okay.

edit: Just to make sure I'm understood, I mean to say "I think it's okay", not to mock the OP who used the pronouns. More directly and non-sarcastically: "Using 'her' for bodies of water is not wrong".

We have already seen 1 great water body lose to human hubris : L̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶i̶k̶a̶l̶ (edit: Aral Sea).

Aral Sea volume (1960) - 1000 cubicKm

Lake Erie volume - 500 cubicKm

So yeah, If L̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶B̶a̶i̶k̶a̶l̶ (edit:Aral Sea) can go down, so can the great lakes.

Lake Baikal is so large and ancient that it’s a major global hotspot for freshwater diversity, hosting entire families found nowhere else.

Do you mean the Aral Sea? Lake Baikal has not been lost at all.

Ah this, is embarassing. Yes, I meant the Aral Sea.

edited to reflect error.

He's got it mostly all wrong. Fertilizer isn't the major contributor it's livestock manure from large farms. If you aren't aware crop farming is a very low margin business. Fertilizer costs real money so if you over fertilize you're likely to lose money.

It's changing slowly but large livestock operations used to spread manure where it was convenient, not where the extra fertilizer was needed. Now they're required to file plans, complete with soil tests to show they're putting the manure where it's less likely to be a problem.

When I left the fertilizer business over twenty years ago we were helping the large livestock farms begin composting. If you rid the manure of it's largest component which is water then hauling a load to a distant field is way more possible.

Hard for some to believe but people who sold fertilizer were encouraging there customers to use less! Imagine a car dealer telling you not to buy an additional car.

The government also had a program where they would pay farmers to plant grass strips along waterways with the idea the strips would intercept the nutrients from fertilizer or manure before they reached the water. However I believe funding for that program was cut which may be adding to the problem.

This seems like a silly distinction. Where's all the feed from that fuels the manure? It's plain obvious this problem is caused by our greatly expanded production of fertilizer since the Haber-Bosch process.

A variable is the water temperature and it’s oxygenation level.

Shading the feeder waterways with 20 m belts of trees, using carbon credits to offset the establishment costs then compensating farmers for the lost area should help.

Everyone is winning. The higher oxygenated cooler water will utilise nitrogen and phosphate more effectively, less nitrogen and phosphate will get into the water as it’s absorbed by trees and less fertiliser will be required because soil hydrology will improve, reducing the amount that runs off instead of turning into plants.

Every 2km of waterway bank planted would hold 1500 tonne of carbon eventually. Erosion would decrease so some local bridge and road infrastructure budgets could go towards more planting. And everywhere you saw corridors of trees in paddocks you would think of native animals traisping along their natural highways.

Humans won’t cooperate and go backwards financially and or reputationally. This would potentially avoid that. It’s not the optimum but would have a positive impact for all involved and a chance of success.

It is a damn important one - going with say novrk fertilizer which breaks down from being "too pressurized" like in depths of water as heat bursts would be less bad than red tides won't do any good when the cause is pigshit.

Plus even if we were fighting wars for guano still manure could have still caused blooms.

Dude come on... we don’t do a lot of livestock up here. It’s all corn and beans. It’s definitely fertilizer and pesticides, no doubt about it.

Michigan has ~300,000 dairy cows, ~100,000 beef cows, and around a million pigs: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/deq-ogl-sbci-MI-Lives...

This document also discusses manure and runoff problems, although not in much detail, it looks to be a PDF of a slide show.

Lake Michigan borders Wisconsin, a state known for animal husbandry.

Those aren’t the issue

There are techniques to containing runoff. They involve structural work, and they go to soil erosion, and other problems. They might be jobs-positive, which is helpful in the current economic times.

There is a similar problem close to the Great Barrier Reef, with the externality (for sugarcane farmers) of their runoff and the sensitivity of coral reefs to nutrient levels and turbidity.

I am unsure Eutrophic water at this scale can be remediated by mechanical means (as in, dealing with oxygenation issues in the lakes, not preventing runoff from reaching the lakes)

We really need to come to grips with doing planning and policy of the developed world with an eye to how it impacts the environment and we really need to worry more about what we are doing to our waters.

If we don't, we may well hit catastrophic failure that solves the problem for us and not in a good way. The pandemic could be just an initial down payment on disasters that will help cut things back to a more sustainable population level.

I suspect that would be, overall, a bad thing. Better to get there by solving such problems elegantly than to get there via catastrophic systemic failure.

I thought the zebra mussels were doing a good job cleaning the water?

They clog all pipes taking water from the Great Lakes, to the tune of millions, tens of millions of dollars a year, and reduce the potential of other filter feeders, native to North America, some of whom are fish.

I wonder what it would take to harvest Zebra mussels for something like cat food (I imagine they don't taste great). I think the shells are valuable in some respect as well. I wish there were more innovation prizes for things where there is a potential market opportunity and big positive externalities.

Considering the cost for any aquatic foods, I doubt they would be cheaper than the current waste products that animal food is made from.

edible, but since they are so efficient at filtering water, they tend to accumulate pollutants and toxins

Isn’t the potential market opportunity and big positive externalities the innovation prize? If you figure out how to turn zebra mussels into cat food, you’ll be rich. Or you won’t and there was no potential marketing opportunity and the positive externalities weren’t that big.

What do you think of: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/x-prize-ch...

Surely it would be profitable when a spill occurs for oil companies to be able to laud their cleanup efforts as the most efficient ever, in addition to benefits to the environment. Yet the X Prize appears to have found a substantially more efficient way than decades of private solutions from big companies.

You'd almost need to invent a technology to efficiently separate them from their shells, not to mention harvesting them in the first place. They glue themselves to their substrate quite strongly, and my experience is that rather than pull off, any attempt to grab them instead pulls them apart.

Zebra mussels (and quagga) aren't huge, either... most of the ones I see are the size of a thumbnail.

No, they (and Quagga mussels) are consuming everything. The water is too clean for native species.

How much fertilizer is runoff from lawns? I think we'd all be a lot better off without every suburban home having a lawn, or at the very least going low or virtually no chemical and letting natural water alone suffice.

Very little, although I do agree with the sentiment.

some quick searching, it’s looking maybe not so little https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-...

We banned phosphates in laundry and dishwasher powder. That was the largest source.

The latter really. Lawns themselves are perfectly fine - if you need some drainage and soil retention assistance. It need not be the crazed monoculture but it can serve a function if you treat it as such. Going xeroscaped in areas with significant rain is a good way to lose your soil to run-off.

I always wanted to pump water from the pond next to my house that collects and holds water from the storm drains figuring if fertilizer runoff is a problem my lawn would be happy to absorb some of it.

Not sure if that is scientifically sound or not....

A lot of storm drains also include raw sewage, so you might want to take a pass on that!

This is a pretty recent suburban environment so I don't expect that, our pond seems sewage free ;)

Brake dust and road surface oils might not be so fun to pump on your lawn though.

While agricultural practices may be to blame, most of the farms in the region are smaller that the ones out west. You won't find 40,000 acre cattle ranches for example.

> The Great Lakes are surrounded by 28 million acres of soybean, corn and hay fields. Most of those fields are managed using intensive mono-cropping methods, which means a single crop, grown in rows for miles on end.

It sounds like it's the type of crop raised and method of cultivation used that's more relevant than the size of the farm.

I think if people paid more attention to what they eat, and then paid attention to what food their meat ate, we would see way less soybean and corn production. Soybean oil sneakily makes it way into a ton of food, but you can actively avoid it. It's not particularly healthy. Emphasizing free range chicken, and grass fed beef would probably decrease soybean and corn demand as well.

Emphasizing tofu would also decrease soybean demand, despite being made of soybeans.

For those who find tofu unappetizing - look up dry-fried tofu. Tofu doesn't have to be consumed as a tasteless spongy cube!

> tofu would also decrease soybean demand

any pointers on why?

The vast majority of soy produced in the world is used for animal feed (~80%, IIRC). Eating the soy directly requires less soy overall than continuously feeding it to animals and eventually eating the animals.

Soybeans aren't a product, they're a platform. They're a almost completely fungible source of protein. Corn is the same thing for carbs.

They're in everything. It's likely been years since you had a meal without any corn or soybean derived ingredients.

> They're in everything. It's likely been years since you had a meal without any corn or soybean derived ingredients.

Not here, just had some lamb legs from an animal I raised/shot/processed myself.

This is why I never eat at restaurants and cook 100% of my meals since the pandemic started.

WFH has finally given me the ability to eat healthy. All meat I buy is pasture-raised corn/soy free (animals never fed it), shipped frozen since you can’t buy that in stores. I’ve followed a “low-lectin” diet for a couple years but it was pretty impossible to not cheat pre-pandemic. Now my main starches are cassava flour and sweet potatoes. Fuck corn/soy.

I guarantee the animals were fed vitamins that were derived from corn.

40,000 acre cattle ranches don't use fertilizer.

But the cattle likely eat plants farmed with fertilizer.

This is often done at the 'finishing' level (I forget what it's technically called, if it is...), even if the cattle are pasture raised for the dominant portion of their lives. You should see these places. Horrific shitholes, literally; cows stand knee deep in their own excrement and I believe they're fed dominantly corn to fatten them up for a few weeks before going off to freezer camp. These kinds of places are on public display on Texas highways and interstates. Even if the ranches where they're raised are 40,000 acres, the places they go before they hit your table may be a whole new world.

but cattle finishing yards generate huge amounts of nitrogenous liquid waste.

I guess my point is that they're mostly smaller, family owned farms. That means the giant scale stuff could still come along and make things worse.

The last paragraph has a train wreck of two ideas smashed into one sentence and nobody has commented on this. Makes you wonder who reads the articles and who skims the articles.

By paragraph you mean sentence?

> The question is whether we can turn convince the owners of mega-farms to the Titanic around fast enough.

There's just once misplaced word there, move "turn" six steps to the right and it's a complete valid sentence. Most likely a copy/paste formatting/refactoring mistake.

Ahmm, you might mean the one before that:

> The solution? Many ecologists agree the answer is small-scale, organic, bio-dynamic farming that includes methods that regenerate the soil instead of destroying it, such as composting, not tilling the soil, using cover crops, planting and diversity of crops and rotating them.

Not tilling the soil? What does that even mean?

Using cover crops? As a layman using cover crops seems like a good idea.

> Not tilling the soil? What does that even mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming

No Till agriculture is exactly what it sounds like - not ploughing it up at the end of a growing season. This has a number of benefits including retaining soil structure and root structure, enhancing and retaining moisture profiles (since adopting this in the mid 90s on my parents farm in Australia we’ve been able to grow crops in drought years that would have otherwise been unviable) however it also comes with other requirements - for example prior to no-till ploughing was important to remove weeds and other unwanted field growth, this is usually accomplished by spraying including long term residual sprays which have lots of potentially dubious effects on the environment

Read a book. It’s called Kiss The Ground. Educate yourself, the knowledge is right there for you.

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Ironically, Zebra mussels helped to filter out the lakes. So much for the experts, and alarmists. How do I know? I live on the Great Lakes. Water sometimes in the summer looks Caribbean Blue. Its the clearest in decades. While I agree that more should be done to control the outflow from farms. I propose ending soy bean farms. This would have the added benefit of starving leftist journalists. Especially ones that regurgitate all the cliche talking points.

I'm kind of in awe at this comment. Not for good reasons, but still.

In case anyone is wondering, no, zebra mussels are still bad. No one was claiming they wouldn't filter water, a feature of all mussels.

"So much for the experts, and alarmists." lol

I believe this is what Ian Danskin coined a "Shrodinger's Douchebag", someone who says dumb and harmful things, then decides if he was joking or not based on reaction.

Dude, I lived through a decade of the "acid rain", and "hole in the ozone" is going to kill us all. I've come to realize that these people are not journalists. They are activists. There's as much science to their claims, as there are genders in the sky.

Ozone depletion was a very serious problem, so in the late 80s there was an international agreement to ban CFCs, halons, and other ozone-depleting chemicals.

It is by no means fixed yet, but now ozone is heading back towards its previous levels, and should be recovered by around 2075. This is a great example of activism working to solve a serious global problem via public policy changes.

You can read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Except, in the same time frame, we went from only the West having Ozone polluting Air Conditioning, to pretty much the whole World having those. In the same time frame, the rest of the world industrialized and are using ozone damaging chemicals on a massive scale. There's no way we actually reduced these chemicals in absolute numbers. Yet the ozone layer is still intact, and apparently its improved. Care to explain?

> the rest of the world industrialized and are using ozone damaging chemicals on a massive scale

I would like to know more about the rest of the world you mentioned, since the Montreal Protocol (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) has been ratified by all United Nations members and the European Union. Based on observed data, it also seems to have the expected positive effect.

They are just now starting to phase out the r22 refrigerant used in ACs with a new one r410, which it self will be phased out. So during the last two decades, the number of ACs used, in places like India and China, has grown exponentially. I've been to India. Window ACs hanging out of windows everywhere. And thats only one of the polluting chemicals. Impossible to measure how much is released in China during manufacturing.

Perhaps, I've died and this is all a dream. But I do believe the world did not end yet. Despite all the articles from blowhards, preaching doom through the last two decades.

r22 has a much lower ozone depletion potential than r11/r12, which were used as refrigerants before. AC use in developing countries is more a global warming issue than an ozone shield issue. A lot of replacements are highly potent greenhouse gases.

The ozone shield had a 4 percent loss since the 70s in average, much larger local losses aka "ozone holes". Fortunately not many people live at the north or south pole.

This sheds some light on what it took to get enough support to actually change regulations:

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/whateve...

Though the CFC and ozone story is inspiring in some ways, it has limitations. It's a very specific problem caused by very specific substances used in a very specific way, for which alternatives are easily found. There isn't a lot of complexity to the problem, relatively speaking.

And end government subsidized corn vis-à-vis ethanol production.

Two funny things: 1) originally environmentalists thought they could make common cause with midwest corn farmers by backing ethanol as a green fuel; that was back in the 80s; 2) for decades now environmentalists having been arguing that we should remove ethanol subsidies because they don't work as promised and have enormous negative externalities of their own. And regardless of the positions of the environmentalists they remain the boogeymen of the right and thus midwestern farmers. Now they, not the farmers, are the ones responsible for the fertilizer runoff and algal blooms. It's almost as if the actual positions of environmentalists were never the issue for those who hate them.

Except, if not for environmentalism, this mess would not exist.

Another funny thing: in your view of the world the entities that made money off this situation -- the farmers and agribusiness -- and the entities that have continuously fought for the ethanol subsidies since they were introduced bear no blame for their negative consequences. The environmentalists, who were their allies initially and have fought them ineffectually now for decades, are entirely responsible. The environmentalists are simultaneously the only people with agency and responsibility in this scenario and largely ineffectual while the farmers and agribusiness are just a force of nature. They bear no more responsibility for their actions than lightning does when it strikes a tree. They are powerful, dominating even, but blameless.

Yes the lake looks cleaner from a distance, but this isn’t a good thing.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-lake-mic...

“Clearer is not necessarily better,” said Robert Shuchman, co-director of the Michigan Tech Research Institute. “Clearer water means less phytoplankton in the water column, and they’re the basic building block in the food web. The idea is, the little fish eat algae, and the bigger fish eat the little fish.

The problem is with these claims that they sound good.

Its extrapolating from a little scientific study, or observation to bullshit conclusions.

Has this Journalist even considered that more light reaching further down into the lake, would dramatically increase the area over which plants can grow. Plants that support plankton and fish habitat.

Has your speculative scenario actually happened?

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