Killer Corn and the Dead Zone

As if there weren’t enough bad news about corn agriculture in the Midwestern “Corn Belt”, scientists have now been able to document how recent increases in corn production for biofuels have put additional pressure on the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”. This vital watershed area around the Mississippi delta (see NASA photo from 1999) is plagued by red tide algal blooms and algal die offs (the areas in green), causing catastrophic oxygen loss in the water to the point where higher organisms cannot survive.  The delta watershed is being monitored from space, and the growing extent of dead water now occupies an area about the size of New Jersey.  This according to an MSNBC-Environment interview from Andrea Thimpson with Dr. Simon Donner, whose group has just completed a landmark report on the phenomenon for the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

According to Dr. Donner, the normal pattern of alternating years of corn production with soy bean planting, stable for a long time in the Midwest, has been changed to a program of straight corn, brought about by subsidies and a government program determined to produce 15 billion gallons of ethanol from corn starch. Soy beans are down, and corn is up. Why that matters is that soy beans are a legume, and use nitrogen removed from the atmosphere, obviating the need for nitrogenous fertilizer, while corn is an especially greedy consumer of this product. (Soybeans also ripen solightly faster and require slightly less rainfall, thus are less risk in bad weather.) Unused and excess fertilizer dissolves in rain water, and runs off downstream, making the water unbelievably fertile for algae growth. The algal blooms engorge the river water with organic matter, and when the algae run out of minerals and die, their decomposition removes all the oxygen from the ocean floor, destroying the entire ecosystem.

Says Donner, “I look at this and it’s hard to be optimistic because you really need to break a subsidy structure to see [improvement] happen, and so the projection for the Gulf of Mexico is not good.” Unless, that is, somebody finds a way to make gasoline out of dead red algae.

In case you haven’t put the big picture together yet, soy beans are the big reason Brazil is burning off record setting areas of rain forest. The price of them, absent US exports, sets new records each year.  Soybeans are the basis of European biofuel production efforts, because the land is less suitable for corn agriculture, and presumably because they don't want the fertilizer runoff in the Danube or whereever. It seems that soy beans are a more “natural” source of ethanol than corn, but the American decision to use corn was based on the fact that we had so much of it sitting around. Well, not any more.

 

P.S. – I hope you get used to the strange buttery, bland flavor of farm raised shrimp, because that Gulf dead zone is where our wild shrimp used to live.

Comments

[greensgal]

You might want to look at this: most of Brazil's soybean production goes to satisfy foreign demands. http://www.fas.usda.gov/pecad/highlights/2004/01/Amazon/Amazon_soybeans.htm
Also, it seems that their corn growth is aimed the same way, because they have banned GM corn. Maybe the blame is not on Brazil! http://www.biotech-info.net/Brazil_record.html

[Napanite]

Isn't there a line in the bible about someone who "sold his birthright for a bowl of pottage"? Brazil does what's best for itself and its people, but it has obviously placed economic improvement over rain forest protection. It's a democracy, and I doubt if Brazilian politicians could have other policies and win. So 13% of the rain forest is gone, with the rest to inexorably follow, except for small lonely stands of preserves, like our National Park System. It isn't any different than what California did with the redwoods. And all that Amazonian corn is becoming animal feed, and those soybeans are going to biofuel makers in Europe. In exchange Brazil gets chainsaws and bulldozers and farm implements, and probably cell phones and PC's and the next addition of Windows.

I do find it amusing that the farmers who illegally slashed all those acres are sneaking into Argentina to get illegal genetic seed, and then lying to the Iranians about its purity. You just can't trust anyone.