Lobby group official says certain farm practices should be regulated to avoid “random acts of conservation”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Decades-old fertilizer and manure are seeping into U.S. streams and rivers and the better nutrient practices of today might take decades to have a measurable impact.
That’s the challenging reality farmers, regulators and governments are having in the United States in dealing with nitrogen, phosphorus and pesticide leaching.
“It can take from days to years to decades to move to the stream,” said Bob Wilber, the chief of national water quality assessment of the U.S. Geological Survey, in an address to the North American Agricultural Journalists April 27.
“Because of the slow move of nitrates from groundwater to rivers, the nutrient increases we have seen at low stream flows have be a reflection of fertilizer applications and other land management practices from many years ago.”
Craig Cox, the senior vice-president for agriculture and natural resources at environmental lobby group Environmental Working Group, said nutrient inflows from past practices are combining with present day nutrient losses to make regulation of farm practices necessary.
There is a “growing frustration with the so-called voluntary approach, or the business-as-usual approach,” said Cox to NAAJ.
“We’re past that, and now I think most of the conversation is not about whether agriculture should be regulated, but how agriculture should be regulated.”
But American Farm Bureau Federation director of regulatory issues Don Parrish said legislating and regulating particular farm practices could be counterproductive, since the problems and solutions to various problems could be completely different from one area to another.
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“The things that are going to be put into place to address the phosphorus loss in Ohio and Lake Erie are different than (what) we’re going to need to be done whether you’re looking at Des Moines water works or whether you look at Arkansas and the Gulf of Mexico,” said Parrish.
“Different nutrients. Different flow paths. Different loss paths of these different nutrients.”
The three speakers agreed that too much nutrient flow is occurring and had a historical basis, with nutrient banks built up over decades of less precise fertilizer and manure application than common today.
But Cox and Parrish had different positions on how to achieve improvements.
Cox said farmers need to be re-quired to employ certain practices because right now farmers who voluntarily choose to implement environmental and water protection are just doing “random acts of conservation.”
If a neighbour upstream or downstream doesn’t protect their land and water, the gains from the conscientious farmer do little good.
Also, Cox said, farmers might do something beneficial like grass a waterway or protect a riverside location, but then a few years later plow up that land or stop protecting it.
“These practices are blinking on and off,” said Cox.
Because of this, farmers should be regulated to use things like grassed waterways, protected riverbanks, restricted access of livestock to waterways, and no nutrient application to frozen or saturated soils.
“Without that combination, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get the nutrient reductions that folks are looking at agriculture to do,” said Cox.
But Parrish said farmers need to be nimble and able apply practices that work and avoid those that don’t, including understanding which nitrate control strategies might actually worsen phosphorus losses, and other unplanned problems.
“Sometimes our conservation practices can be antagonistic and we don’t know what when we ask farmers to implement them,” said Parrish.
“That’s a real problem and one that farmers scratch their heads about.”
For example, buffer zones and grassed waterways can prevent or slow the flow of nitrates into streams, but also create a nutrient “sink” and worsen the potential for phosphorus to flow off the soil’s surface.
“We may have to figure out how to manage conservation practices more effectively,” said Parrish.
“We may be seeing the effects of not plowing contribute to the loss of phosphorus.”
Wilber of the USGS said nutrient losses from agriculture are still occurring, with about 16 percent of the added nutrients not being consumed by crops.
Over the past century, while manure application has not increased, fertilizer application has increased 10 times.
Combined with a near-doubling of the U.S. population and outflows from cities and cottages, nutrification of places like the Gulf of Mexico, Puget Sound and Chesapeake Bay has become well known.
As well, the problems of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers become major Iowa issues.
With much of the over fertilization of the past only now reaching waterways through slow-moving groundwater, the future situation might not improve for years.
“The full effect of today’s management practices may not be measureable in those rivers until many years into the future,” said Wilber.
But that gave hope to Parrish, who said farmers are quick to employ new technologies that will save them wasting nutrients and throwing away inputs. That can be seen in the 87 percent increase in U.S. corn production from 1980 to 2010, with a four percent decrease in overall fertilizer application for the crop.
“That’s a huge, huge gain in efficiency,” said Parrish.
“And it’s a lot less nutrient that’s left in the environment to be lost.”
Contact ed.white@producer.com
