Given our world population explosion, it's the quandary of food production versus water quality in todays world! The same drive for efficiency that lowers the cost of eating also damages our soil and water if we let it, and so far we're letting it! China's been suffering and it's getting even worse for them!
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| Boat motoring through an algae bloom |
This is where the problem starts.......
Farmers near chicken houses or hog farms often take lots of manure and spread it on their fields, partly just to get rid of it and partly for its value as fertilizer. Chicken and hog growers also sell their manure directly to farmers. Crops, need much more nitrogen than phosphorus. When farmers use manure to give their crops an optimal amount of nitrogen, they oversupply phosphorus.
This is happening everywhere, where you have large concentrations
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| Florida Manatee Struggling to Survive |
of animal production, you tend to have a buildup of nutrients - phosphorus is the one that accumulates - in soils around concentrated animal-producing regions.
Phosphorus is one of the nutrients that plants need to grow, and for most of human history, farmers always needed more of it. This is not the case today!
Traditionally, farmers got phosphorus from animal manure. So if you
grew crops like corn or wheat, it was good to have poultry or hogs nearby. Your grain fed the animals, and their manure fed your crops. Everything worked together.
Then came industrial fertilizer: big phosphorus mines; factories for making the other important nutrient, nitrogen; and railroads or highways to carry that fertilizer to any farmer who needed it.
With the development of the inorganic fertilizer industry, it's possible to grow grain without having animals nearby. So you decouple the animal agriculture from the grain agriculture, and there you have it today.......POOR WATER QUALITY!
Lake Erie Algae Blooms are coming back with a vengeance in 2015! A massive red tide is moving it's way up the Pacific Coast, fish and manatees are dieing in record numbers in some areas! Is it really all that bad? Well....let's just say that if it's not in your area, it is somewhere else in America, and not just a few places either!
FORMS THAT HAVE NOT CHANGED: 
Following studies that showed the nation's stormwater regulatory program wasn't meeting objectives under the Clean Water Act, the USEPA has been bringing the hammer down on municipalities whose mandated stormwater protection efforts bore little activity, and in some cases, no activity. 
required to do under federal law.
Questions worth asking yourself now that the world is growing by over 200,000 people every day and America growing by almost 6 
