Thanks for the thread, alp.

...that's why Los Angeles couldn't drain Lake Mono dry.

Brilliant. And when people starve who will they sue?

The fertilizers are applied to corn and soy that's converted by factory farms into McDonald's cheeseburgers, high fructose corn syrup and Doritos.

We won't lose much by suing them, and in the long run, forcing them to be more efficient with fertilizer applications saves them money.

Now I have heard everything.... Well go sue 'em. Get back to us when that gets somewhere.

Via a GPS-controlled tractor, tilling fencerow-to-fencerow, spraying tons of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, who's crop's only purpose is to fatten up cattle in feedlots to fatten up humans at McDonalds, a farmer in any sense of the word. You can eat the "food" they help synthesize (I can't bring myself to say "grow" or "produce", given the factories required to process the raw materials), but I choose to stay away from that crap.

But what do I know, I'm only the kid of 6 generations of family farmers, working on establishing my own organic CSA on 1.5 acres of land

and for a few years we all went around in tattletale gray clothing until they managed to reformulate detergents to compensate for the loss of phosphates.

I found a box of old Rinso White detergent that must've been from the 40s in the basement of a semi abandoned house in Boston. I used it and couldn't believe the difference a few phosphates made.

I guess agribusiness thought they could double down on the stuff once we no longer had it.

living near the Lake... Prices of their houses must be going down each year..

Yet there seems never to be a unified effort on their behalf to join with the conservationists to address this issue..

Are they so fearful of transitioning to a socialist point of view.. Backing EPA attempts to address these issues?

It was created by Nixon in 1970. Besides what have been the "EPA attempts to address these issues"?

About how the drainage ditches along the sides of the roads would, as they said, boil at times when it rained...they always said it was all the chemicals and fertilizers used on the crops.

They also discussed how the male farmers died off from cancers (my uncle...a horrid cancer)...only to be followed by their wives a few years later (my aunt...but she did out live him by about 20 years...her rarely being out in the fields may have helped her live for more years)...they called it one of the dirty secrets of the farming business.

Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations. Exposure to pesticides and even the dust of harvesting and handling grains (which contains molds and bacteria and many other natural toxic substances) and the dust of dried animal waste combines to produces one of the highest rates of cancer and other chronic diseases of any occupation. Even those working in the chemical industry, because of strict safety codes and protective gear, rarely have exposure levels anywhere near those of people working in agriculture. Add to this the fact that farming also has one of the highest rates of fatal and disabling injuries due to accidents with farm machinery and you have an occupation almost guaranteed to put you in an early grave.

Fertilizer runoff is a land use issue. It can be minimized by simply requiring a buffer zone of only a few tens of yards between crop land and drainage systems. Unfortunately farmers and agribusiness want to maximize land use and therefore grow crops right up to drainage systems. This not only promotes pollution of water systems with both fertilizers and pesticides, it also promotes erosion and excessive silting of waters. The amount of land removed from production to do this would only amount to a tiny fraction of a percent of total cultivated land, but because of the complexity of drainage patterns, some small farmers would be hit harder than others. This has allowed agribusiness to point to these few vulnerable farmers as reason to lobby against any effort to reduce runoff.

Thank you for elaborating...I don't think many in America have any idea of these health hazards.

Glad you're here. Thanks for this info - it helps illuminate the extent of the danger, and I'm sure most of us don't immediately regard farming as dangerous occupation. But it most certainly is. It's hard work, period, aside from the other complications it presents. One would hope that farmers in particular would be first in line to bring attention to the whole idea of careful and responsible custodianship of the land.

My dad was a Nazi when it came to his children being in the house or off the farm when he was spraying the fields. And you're right about the dust as well; the day after baling and stacking a field of alfalfa or cleaning out the dry, dusty hog barns, you'd be coughing up black phlem like you had the plague.

One of our neighbors died in the 1990's when I was a teenager. The safety valve on a tank of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer failed, and he took a massive blast of ammonia gas to the face, destroying his lungs in the process. His wife found him later that day in the field so no one saw it happen, but everyone knew it wasn't a quick, painless death

I attended the OSU's 'mini campus' on Gibraltar Island for a summer to take several classes.

Even back then the blooms had started again after their long hiatus after the lake had been cleared in the 70s and 80s.

Such a shame the blooms are coming back with a vengeance.

those nitrates, etc are accompanied by a ridiculous amount of topsoil. ridiculous.
this is what you get w fencerow to fencerow farming.
no weeds. no dead wood. no bumpers. just flushed like a toilet.

unfuckingbelievable.

but damming up this runoff, and using it as part of active soil building along the periphery doesnt require so much change.

i am sure there are issues of drainage here that are part of this. not letting it run off at all would drown crops. but find a happy medium so that you can plow that shit back in.

But then, I wasn't farming for profit. Riparian zones with trees or water loving plants help water clean. It seems what was learned with the Dust Bowls have been forgotten. I suspect, too, that the biggest of the polluters are corporate owned farms, not family ones, but do. Some operations make short cuts because they want to reduce the cost of labor. The rural areas have much different concerns than urbanites, overall. Just holding onto a chunk of land is no easy feat.