After A Dozen Years, Voluntary Measures Not Working On Lake Erie's Recurring Cyanobacteria Blooms

EDIT

States have broader leeway to act. But they have largely opted to make recommendations about farming practices and promote voluntary measures that don’t draw opposition from influential agricultural trade groups. After Toledo’s water crisis, Ohio went further, passing a law that prohibits farms in the western Lake Erie region from applying fertilizer on frozen or rain-saturated soil. But here, too, most fertilizer runoff efforts are voluntary — and exceptions undercut the state’s 2015 ban.

More than a dozen years have passed since Ohio convened a task force to figure out how to tackle its Lake Erie problem. Since 2011, the state has spent more than $3 billion on it, largely to upgrade sewage and drinking water plants. But Ohio’s agriculture nutrient-reduction strategy has yet to show results. “Everything we’ve done so far, trying to reach these reductions voluntarily, has had no impact,” said Jeff Reutter, a longtime Lake Erie researcher who retired from the Ohio State University in 2017. “The voluntary approach has been — I guess you’d say — a total failure.”

he state could set legally enforceable limits on nutrients in Lake Erie. It hasn’t. Two groups and a local county are suing the EPA, arguing that it has a duty to make Ohio officials act. The state also could mandate that farmers not use more fertilizer than their crops need. It hasn’t done that, either. It barely tracks the issue. Little information about how much farms fertilize is publicly available beyond some documentation from operations raising large numbers of animals, such as several thousand or more pigs.

Dozens of such sites, producing more than 760 million gallons of phosphorus-rich manure each year that they must do something with, are in the region that drains into western Lake Erie. An analysis by Public Integrity and its partners of Ohio Department of Agriculture permits for those farms found widespread application of manure to land that the farms’ own soil tests show already had more than enough phosphorus for key crops. That increases the odds of nutrients leaving the fields to fuel harmful algae.

EDIT

https://publicintegrity.org/environment/growing-food-sowing-trouble/lake-erie-toxic-algae-farm-manure-runoff/