"So how long will this go on before it gets really ugly?" asked Laura in an irritated tone.
"Will what go on?" replied Alexander, deep in his accounts folder and co-op invoices.
"The dead zone! Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico! Look at that!" Laura pointed at a map on the public television documentary, one that compared the mid-continent's corn acreage in green to the size of a large brown smear at the mouth of the Mississippi RIver, the annual zone of hypoxia in the blue Gulf.
The image flickered away before Alexander looked up. "It's bad, I know. I tried to cut back this year, but... Man! Where does the money go?" Alexander punched his calculator keypad emphatically.
Laura turned the audio off. "How much did you cut back?" she asked, as if questioning a chemically dependent parolee who had promised change, but cheated, in the past.
At this point, Alexander did look up. "Wait a minute. What are you implying? That I'm part of the problem? Well, you're right. I am part of the problem. I'm a fifth generation Iowa farmer trying to make a living, trying to raise a family, trying to take care of my piece of ground as best I can. So...what's your point? That it's ugly? The dead zone is ugly. But my crops are beautiful this year."
Laura sighed and looked out the Murphy homestead window across a stand of soybeans that was in corn last year. Another dusky sunset burned bright orange in the northwest among a few low clouds edged pink and purple. Mosquitoes and June bugs buzzed and bounced outside.
"You didn't answer my question," she persisted, looking back at her farmer bent over his figures.
"Ten percent. I cut it to point nine of the recommended N budget, and figured 30 pounds per for last year's beans and 30 pounds for the winter rye we turned under. At a pound per bushel yield, 132 per acre for this place, less 30, less 30, times point nine, that's..."
The calculator buttons made a quick pattering sound.
"Sixty-four point eight pounds of applied N per acre. How's that?" he asked.
"Not bad," she said. "You do better than most, but you still only cut it 10 percent, in spite of adding that winter rye. You cut your costs, but you're still only a third of the way to the federal goal of a 30% N cut that will start, just start, not finish, fixing the hypoxia problem."
"OK, Ms. Biologist," he retorted, "what are the real numbers you're going to throw at the big operators who make three passes total over their corn ground a year?"
"Forty to 45 percent cuts to take the dead zone back to 2,000 square miles from where it was in 2002, about 8,000 square miles of water too poor to support fish," she responded. "That's what the NOAA experts say now."
"No way! Guys like Harold Mundt will never cut nitrogen by that amount; it would cost them too much money." Alexander exclaimed.
"'Pay now or pay later,' if you ask me," Laura replied. "The pressure will be on every Representative and Senator to tie agricultural subsidy payments for nonpoint source ag polluters to watershed improvements. The agricorporations will try to head it off, but sooner or later the moderate Republicans, the Democrats, and the Greens are going to force the issue because the voters will want it. People understand Total Minimum Daily Loads. Once those TMDL numbers are all in place, the facts will show soon enough who's bad and who's good."
"I can see it now. Harold Mundt, out there in waders water testing his tile outlets to make sure he's in compliance with the Clean Water Act! Baloney! He'll never do it," scoffed Alexander.
Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network
and The Upper Basin Chronicles © 2003 Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.
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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.