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The chemical industry is big business in Louisiana. Companies here manufacture plastics, fuels, pesticides, and cleaning products. But one part of the chemical industry that’s often overlooked is the fertilizer business.
Today, you’re going to hear the story of modern fertilizer, and how this powerful concoction of chemicals has radically reshaped how we farm and what we eat. In this episode, we follow the journey of fertilizer from Louisiana to the Midwest, then back down along the Mississippi River to a place it creates in the Gulf. A place called: The Dead Zone.
This episode was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization. We also had support from the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk.
This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and reported by Garrett Hazelwood and Eric Schmid. This episode was edited by Eve Abrams. Additional help from Carlyle Calhoun, Eva Tesfaye, Ryan Vasquez, Ted Ross, and Brent Cunningham. The episode was fact-checked by Naomi Barr. Sea Change's executive producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. It’s also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
Convent, Louisiana is a narrow strip of land on the eastbank of St. James Parish. A bend in the river. Just a few clusters of modest houses with big lawns alongside sugarcane fields.
This small town is about an hour upriver from New Orleans. The community is majority Black, and many here can trace their roots to ancestors who were enslaved on nearby plantations.
Barbara Washington: My great grandmother--or great, great, great grandmother, uh, in 1874, she came out of slavery and she purchased 34 acres of land.
Barbara Washington is in her early 70s. She’s wearing blue jeans and rectangular glasses. It’s only 9 am but the sun rose hours ago like an oven door opening, and the sky is so blue it hurts to look at.
It’s late summer, and the sugar cane is well over our heads. But beyond it, just a few hundreds yards from us, is the land Barbara’s family has been cultivating for generations. She points to it.
BARBARA: That land is right over here. …And, uh, it's still in our family. It's 150 years old.
To our left, across a two-lane road and the levee beside it, is the river that built this place. And I mean that literally. The land we’re standing on, like all the land in Southern Louisiana, was carried here as sediment by the Mississippi River. The whole area is barely above sea level.
And yet about two miles behind us is something you just don’t see in this part of the country.
Barbara: It looks like a big mountain.
A mountain. In a floodplain. And that mountain, well, it’s laced with poison. It’s a mountain of radioactive waste leftover from the production of fertilizer.
And it’s right there beside fields where food is grown. Just down the road from Barbara’s house and the park beside it, where children play.
HOST INTRO
That’s investigative journalist, Garrett Hazelwood.
The chemical industry is big business in Louisiana. Companies here manufacture plastics, fuels, pesticides and cleaning products. But one part of the chemical industry that’s often overlooked is the fertilizer business.
Chemical fertilizer is a cornerstone of modern farming. It helps grow the food and food products billions of people eat. It’s also causing vast environmental damage.
I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change. Today, you’re going to hear the story of modern fertilizer, and how this powerful concoction of chemicals has radically reshaped how we farm and what we eat. And how it’s poisoning communities, upending livelihoods, and choking the life out of a huge swathe of the ocean.
In this episode, we follow the journey of fertilizer from Louisiana to the Midwest, then back down along the Mississippi River to a place it creates in the Gulf. A place called The Dead Zone.
Coming up, Garrett Hazelwood, starts us off with a chemistry lesson.
BREAK
To understand how Barbara Washington came to have that mountain of toxic waste near her home, you need to know a few things about the modern fertilizer industry.
First, there are three main nutrients that plants need, often abbreviated as NPK. The N is nitrogen. The P is phosphorus. And the K is potassium.
Farmers today often use a combination of all three, but the one they use the most of is nitrogen.
But that’s a relatively new development. Because there used to be a limited amount of nitrogen available in nature.
See, for thousands of years, farmers have known that when they take nutrients out of their soil, by harvesting crops, they have to put nutrients back in. So they replenished their fields using what was at hand. They spread animal manure, and they allowed plants to grow and die and return to the soil--both of which replenished the fields with NPK.
Things more or less continued that way until the early 1900s, when demand for nitrogen skyrocketed. That happened because nitrogen does more than make powerful fertilizer. It also makes powerful explosives.
WWI ARCHIVAL (0:40): The first world war is fought on a scale never before seen in the whole of human history.
When WWI broke out, countries at war in Europe needed nitrogen to bomb their enemies. And the competition over the world’s few nitrogen deposits became intense.
Which is why it was so world-changing when a German chemist named Fritz Haber discovered how to pull nitrogen directly from the air. To turn it from a gas that’s plentiful in Earth’s atmosphere, into a solid or liquid.
That process yields a form of nitrogen called ammonia. And after Haber’s invention, Germany started churning out tens of thousands of tons of ammonia.
The U.S. had to catch up. Here’s President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940:
ROOSEVELT (0:05): WE MUST INCREASE PRODUCTION FACILITIES FOR EVERYTHING NEEDED FOR THE ARMY AND NAVY FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE.
During WWII, the U.S. built a bunch of new ammonia plants, so it could mass produce munitions.
And after the war, when all that ammonia was no longer needed for bombs, chemical companies were left with a surplus. And they needed new buyers. They began marketing their ammonia to farmers.
ARCHIVAL 16:48 AMERICA NEEDS GOOD FERTILIZERS TO HELP BUILD A STRONG AGRICULTURE FOR THE FUTURE.
American farmers went from using almost no chemical fertilizer in the 1930s to almost 50 pounds per acre by 1960. Four decades after that, farmers had tripled that number, going from about 50 to 150 pounds per acre.
But using all that fertilizer came with a cost.
We started this story in Louisiana, where chemical fertilizer is being made. And where companies making that fertilizer load it onto barges, freight ships, trains, and into pipelines that spiderweb across the country. So now, we’re going to trace just one of the routes fertilizer takes when it leaves Louisiana.
My colleague Eric Schmid, a reporter in St. Louis, is going to take us upriver to a farm in the Midwest.
In his reporting, Eric found that the dramatic spike in the use of agricultural chemicals means many farmers today can’t go without them. It’s just a part of staying in business.
Like Garret said, Here in the Midwest synthetic fertilizer is a part of life for farmers… like Doug Downs.
DOUG: “Corn will grow without applied nitrogen. It just won’t grow and produce as well.”
Doug is tall and stocky with short brown hair and an infectious smile. He’s been farming for decades… and these days grows about 2-thousand acres of mostly corn and soybeans in central Illinois – about halfway between St. Louis and Chicago.
And that “applied” Nitrogen (tone)? Well, for Doug, it’s non-negotiable.
DOUG: “I need that nitrogen, I gotta have it. Now I don’t want to apply too much.”
Doug has good reasons not to use too much nitrogen (tone), and we will get to that.
But first, let’s talk about how chemical fertilizers are important for something called yield.
Yield is the corn, soy or whatever crop that comes off the field each year – what a farmer sells to make money… to keep the farm afloat. Chemical fertilizer –nitrogen – helps increase that yield.
DOUG: “No farmer ever wants to run out of nitrogen. You always want to make sure you got enough and people over apply nitrogen for that reason. That is true that that does happen. Don’t want to sacrifice yield.”
For decades, farmers have been nudged by market forces and government policies to increase their yields
Drive through America’s bread basket today the view is pretty much the same no matter if you’re on a highway or bumpy county road: seemingly endless fields of soy and corn.
**crunch crunch crunch… which makes things like corn chips. One of my favorite road trip snacks .**
These days more than 80-percent of the corn and soy the U.S. produces comes from this part of the country. We’re talking more than 1-hundred million acres dedicated to just two crops. But the vast majority of it doesn’t become chips or soy milk. It goes to animal feed or, in the case of corn, ethanol fuel.
Chemicals – pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and nitrogen – helped remake America’s bread basket to look this way.
But there are trade-offs. Using chemical fertilizer on the same fields, over and over, degrades that soil’s health, so farmers have to use more and more of it over time.
On top of that, fertilizer is expensive.
ERIC: How many 1000s of dollars do you spend on nitrogen a year?
DOUG: You mean hundreds of thousands? I couldn’t tell you… in the neighborhood of $100,000 just for me.
1-hundred thousand dollars just for fertilizer.
And that doesn't even account for some of nitrogen’s other costs – the price we pay when it runs off the fields where it's applied, which a broad consensus of scientists says happens to around half of the fertilizer that’s used around the globe.
Point is: Doug has good reason to use less fertilizer.
DOUG: “Yes. Flat out. Yes. I’m going to reduce my nitrogen usage next year.”
Doug’s part of a program which offers cash incentives in exchange for trying a slew of farming methods aimed at keeping nitrogen and phosphorus from leaving his fields.
And Doug volunteered to join this program– so he could make changes on his terms – before anyone forced him to.
DOUG: “How can we avert government regulations? Because we don’t want that.”
Neither do lobbyists from the fossil fuel and agricultural industries. For decades, they’ve fought hard against new regulations, including those related to climate issues, often citing economic reasons.
One lobbying organization, The American Farm Bureau even called for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1980.
And all this activism has paid off. There aren’t any national regulations regarding nitrogen use by farmers and there likely won't be any anytime soon. No sticks. Instead, The government relies on carrots. A menu of carrots. Scores of grants – all aimed to entice farmers to either use less fertilizer or keep it from running off from their fields.
But the problem is: these carrots aren’t making much of a dent. For one, very few farmers are biting. Doug is an outlier because he’s willing to voluntarily change how he farms.
And the program he’s in, like most government farming programs, promotes using another kind of fertilizer… Something called cover crops.
DOUG: “It piqued my interest. Hey, can I grow my nitrogen source without having to buy synthetic nitrogen?’”
Synthetic nitrogen … in case the name isn’t clear enough… is the stuff that companies manufacture specifically to fertilize crops, what comes from industrial facilities in Louisiana.
Cover crops do the same thing, but naturally, and they’re actually not all that new…. Farmers used them for centuries before chemical fertilizer burst onto the scene.
These plants – cereal rye, winter wheat, hairy vetch and many others – cover a farmer’s field in the winter – the time of year when they can’t grow cash crops like corn and soy.
They capture excess nitrogen leftover in the soil, that could otherwise runoff during rainstorms. Some cover crops even pull nitrogen out of the air and store it in their roots. All this captured nitrogen remains available for future crops.
But most cover crops don’t find as much nitrogen as a farmer can get with applying synthetic fertilizer.
Doug has cover crops on about a quarter of his acres, but with no cattle eating them, they’re too expensive to put on all his fields, even with incentives.
But he’s always checking out how his neighbors use them.
DOUG: “I drive around in the dead of winter looking at cover crops. And I pay attention to what other people do, seeing what works and what doesn't.”
One day, it might be profitable to put cover crops on all his acreage. But for now, he still relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer
<<NEW SECTION>>
Especially one called anhydrous ammonia, which is what’s made when you pull nitrogen directly from the air. The process that Garrett mentioned. Doug injects anhydrous ammonia into his fields.
DOUG: “Some people won’t use it. It’s dangerous. It’s hard to handle. But it’s the most widely used nitrogen source.”
It’s also the cheapest nitrogen source because it’s shipped via pipeline from where it’s made – including Louisiana– to a facility not far from Doug’s farmland.
But the cost of Doug's nitrogen can jump around… like a few years ago when the price dropped in half. It was Fall, not the perfect time of year to fertilize, but the price was right.
DOUG: “ the problem is that we had to take delivery of that nitrogen. Essentially apply it in the fall. We can’t store it… unless you have humongous gigantic farm storage tanks, which is absolutely impractical.””
So Doug injected the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer into the soil many months before the growing season. Which means, with every rain and melting snow, some of that nitrogen left his fields and entered the watershed.
DOUG: “But how can I, as a businessman, not buy an input for half the cost? How can I ignore that?”
Also hard to ignore is how much fertilizer washes off Midwestern farms and travels down the Mississippi River. The Union of Concerned Scientists– a national science-based non-profit– estimates the amount of runoff is equivalent to 3,000 shipping containers of nitrogen being dumped into the gulf each year, every year, since 1980.
<<END NEW SECTION>>
When I called Doug up recently he told me he was still committed to using less chemical fertilizer. This year, for example, he’s putting it on his fields much closer to the planting season.
As much as Doug may want to cut back on chemical fertilizers it has to work financially. His farm has to stay solvent.
DOUG: "My definition of sustainability is staying in business, and putting my kids through school and making my mortgage payments and making my farm payments? You know, there's my definition of sustainability. I certainly don't want to pollute my water doing it."
He says no farmer wants that.
But Doug and so many farmers like him are locked into this system. They have to use chemical fertilizer to make ends meet.
But what goes upriver, inevitably comes back downriver. And it comes with costs, ones that aren’t measured in dollars or cents.
Coming up, Garret Hazelwood picks up the story where we started this episode where the fertilizer that feeds Midwestern crops is manufactured. … strangling Louisiana communities and ecosystems all the way down to the dead zone in the gulf.
BREAK
The kind of farming that Doug Downs does, it’s business. But it’s probably not what you think when you hear the word “farm.”
You probably picture something more like how Barbara Washington grew up.
You met Barbara earlier, pointing to the land her family has lived on for 150 years.
BARBARA: “My grandfather had a garden. …he had me on the little tractor riding. …We had mustard greens that were GOOD mustard greens.
They kept chickens and ducks. Barbara picked figs and made jam. She harvested pecans to sell for pocket money.
But then when she was in high school in the 1960s construction began on a fertilizer plant down the road from her family’s land. A phosphorus fertilizer plant, to be exact. The P in our NPK.
The production process the company uses creates about 5 tons of waste for every one ton of product. So the company piled up the waste--a hazardous material called phosphogypsum--behind the facility, creating their toxic mountain in the floodplain.
And meanwhile, more fertilizer and petrochemical companies opened other facilities nearby.
Those two industries, by the way--chemical fertilizer and Oil & Gas--are deeply intertwined. Fertilizer companies use gas to produce ammonia, making them some of the biggest buyers of American gas.
As all these chemical plants moved to town, Barbara watched that mountain of toxic waste from the fertilizer plant grow taller. She watched the pecan and fig trees disappear. She saw her garden produce less and less food. She saw her friends and relatives move away.
50 years on, the little stretch of river where she lives is now the place where more chemical fertilizer is produced than anywhere else in the United States. That pile of toxic waste--now owned by a company called Mosaic--has become a roughly 200-foot-tall mountain with a toxic lake inside it--kind of like a volcano. The base of the volcano is nearly two miles wide and one mile long.
NEWS REPORT (0:26): It’s one of the tallest places in Louisiana, a 200-foot tall reservoir, and what it’s typically holding back is about 800 million gallons of acidic waste.
And did I mention it’s radioactive? That’s because there are trace amounts of radium and uranium that are naturally present in the phosphate rock that Mosaic mines. The company refines them out, but then dumps them all together in its toxic pile.
Those radioactive heavy metals decay into a radioactive gas called radon, which according to the EPA, is the country’s second leading cause of lung cancer.
And the structure itself, filled with a lake that has at times held over a billion gallons of acid water, it’s just not very stable. Similar toxic mountains at other fertilizer facilities in Florida have sprung massive leaks, causing numerous environmental catastrophes.
NEWSCAST (0:11): Tonight, there are reports of millions of gallons of contaminated water now flowing into the Florida aquifer.
NEWSCAST (0:12): Today Manatee County declared a state of emergency.
NEWSCAST (2:26): Millions of gallons of sludgy acidic wastewater emptied into…surrounding wetlands.
The EPA regulates these mountains of fertilizer waste. But in 2019, the ground at the base of the mountain by Barbara’s house began to buckle, threatening to spill its toxic lake across the community. The earth heaved up in a scar nearly half a mile long. Emergency crews were able to stop the stack from collapsing, but it was a close call. And the mountain has only grown since then.
As we’re standing at the edge of that sugarcane field down the street from Barbara’s family land, an SUV pulls into the driveway beside us and Gail Leboeuf gets out.
[Tape of Gail saying hi]
She has gray hair and brown eyes that don’t seem to miss much.
[Tape of Gail saying hi]
Gail and Barbara invite me into a single-story brick house. It’s headquarters for the organization they co-founded, Inclusive Louisiana, which works to educate and mobilize the community against threats from industrial pollution. In the living room, there’s a stack of buckets filled with hurricane relief supplies they’ll be handing out to their neighbors, and two folding tables.
Gail sorts through some papers and lays a map on the table.
Gail: See this map shows you where the people live AMONG the industry.
What she’s showing me is the huge number of industrial facilities that have been built throughout her community. According to EPA data, a few of the facilities responsible for some of the worst pollution are making fertilizer.
The toxic mountain is a couple miles southeast of where we’re sitting. A few miles to the northwest the same company--Mosaic--has another facility. And 15 miles upriver, there’s yet another toxic mountain of radioactive waste.
And that’s just the plants producing phosphorus fertilizer. Across the river, in a city called Donaldsonville, is what the company that operates it, CF Industries, touts as the world’s largest ammonia-producing complex. The EPA also calls it the number one carbon polluter in the entire state of Louisiana. And to put that in context, about a quarter of all countries have a lower emissions footprint than that one plant.
Oh, and the facility with the toxic mountain by Barbara’s house--they’re looking to expand.
GAIL: Now they want to build another gypsum stack, start another one….200 foot high. Lord have mercy.
Barbara says the fertilizer and other petrochemical plants are the reason that living off the land, as her family did for over a century, is no longer an option.
Some of her neighbors are afraid to go outside and breathe the air. They don’t dare drink the well water. The place where they live has a nickname now. People call it:
[Clips of newscasts using the phrase “Cancer Alley”: 0:09; 1:07; 0:11; 1:10; 0:04; ]
BARBARA: This is Cancer Alley
But Barbara and Gail? They’re fighting back.
Their organization is suing St. James Parish to stop local officials from permitting the construction of additional polluting facilities, arguing that zoning laws have disproportionately harmed Black neighborhoods.
Local and state officials, meanwhile, have long celebrated the companies responsible for the pollution.
JINDAL: This is a great day for our parish. …Let’s give the folks at Mosaic a great round of applause for choosing Louisiana.
That’s former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in 2012, standing with the parish president, announcing that Mosaic intended to build a new ammonia plant in St. James Parish.
You hear this a lot in Louisiana: petrochemical companies spewing pollution are good for the local economy.
In 2025, governor Jeff Landry continued the tradition, proudly announcing CF Industries will expand its nitrogen plant in Donaldsonville.
Around Convent, industrial plants owned by multinational companies are everywhere. And bars, restaurants, and the kind of businesses where local people can buy clothes, groceries, or school supplies for their children? Not so much.
BARBARA: WE DON'T HAVE A MAJOR STORE, WE DON'T HAVE A GAS STATION. YOU KNOW, FROM THE SUNSHINE BRIDGE TO THE VETERANS MEMORIAL BRIDGE, WE CAN'T BUY A DECENT PAIR OF SHOES.”
And yet the CEOs of Mosaic and CF Industries both make about $12 million a year.
Meanwhile, according to the company’s website, the majority of workers at the CF Industries plant – remember, Louisiana’s biggest polluter – are hired as contractors, meaning they aren’t given the benefits or job security that full-time employees would get.
Gail Leboeuf: “The plants are the new plantations of the South. They still using the same people, the same way for revenue that they did during slavery.”
We reached out to Mosaic and CF Industries multiple times for comment. A Mosaic representative said they were unable to respond in time for publication. We received no reply from CF Industries.
It’s a dark irony that the fertilizer companies whose products help create abundance elsewhere are draining the life out of Convent.
But Convent is just the epicenter. Because the chemical fertilizer that’s manufactured in Cancer Alley, it leaves. And thousands of farmers, like Doug Downs, put those chemicals into the soil.
And then it rains. The chemicals wash into streams and creeks that flow into the Mississippi River. And so much chemical fertilizer winds up right back where it started, in Louisiana, way down at the bottom of the state where the river meets the sea.
(MUSIC)
OLANDER: I fished these waters since 1978. So what's that? 45, 46 years now.
Thomas Olander is a shrimper. His grandfather was a shrimper, his father was a shrimper, his brother is a shrimper. His wife is a shrimper too.
It’s a windy day, and he’s standing on the deck of his boat in the marina at Cypremort Point, a peninsula right in the middle of the arch of Louisiana’s boot, explaining that shrimping isn’t just a job for him. It’s a part of his heritage and his culture. Not so long ago, it was the lifeblood of his community.
OLANDER: BACK IN THE EIGHTIES, NINETIES, YOU COULDN’T FIT ANOTHER BOAT IN THIS BAYOU
Those were the boom times. Louisiana’s shrimping and shellfish industry in the mid- to late nineties brought in about $2 billion a year for the state economy. But now the marina is quiet.
OLANDER: AND WE'RE DOWN TO TWO FISHERMEN, THIS BOAT AND THAT BOAT.
The boat he points to in the next slip is his brother’s. Thomas’ own boat is called the Tommy Boy, named for his son, who was going out on fishing trips on it since before he was old enough to walk.
Tommy Jr. captains his own shrimp boat now.
OLANDER: HE'S VERY GOOD AT WHAT HE DOES. I MEAN, I BETTER DO EVERYTHING I CAN TO BEAT HIM.
And yet, Thomas Sr. worries there might not be another generation of shrimpers in the family. Between 2001 and 2018, the number of shrimpers fishing in Louisiana declined by well over half. That decline happened for several reasons. A flood of cheap imports have caused the price of shrimp to plummet. The cost of fuel has gone up. And the Gulf is changing. The abundance that Thomas and his family have relied on is in jeopardy.
For at least a decade now, Thomas has known that something isn’t right. He says the shrimp aren’t growing to the same size as they used to.
OLANDER: The water is just not good. The water is polluted. It's just a real polluted water now.
He’s right about the pollution.
Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found that all those chemicals washing down from the Midwest are having an effect. Lately, Thomas has been seeing it on the surface. Thick mats of water lilies clogging up the fishing grounds, making it hard for him to dip his nets.
OLANDER: We're so inundated with water lilies now, like we've never been before. and it has to be from that, that fertilizer that's getting that stuff to grow like, like crazy now.
Whether you apply it to agricultural fields or the ocean, fertilizer will do what fertilizer does best: make plants grow. Those water lilies are just the tip of the iceberg.
And Thomas isn’t the only one interested in what fertilizer pollution is doing to the Gulf.
GLASPIE: I’m Dr. Cassie Glaspie. I am at Louisiana State University and I'm an assistant professor of marine science.
Dr. Glaspie leads a team of researchers documenting the effects that fertilizer pollution is having on marine life.
Each summer, she and her team take a boat named the Pelican, a big research ship outfitted with scientific equipment, and they motor out into the Gulf.
[Ambi, student researcher (Emily) reading instruments on Pelican]
They work around the clock, day shifts and night shifts. They have this 6-foot-tall array of scientific instruments that are all bolted together in a big cylinder called a CTD. It collects water samples and data on things like temperature, salinity, and oxygen levels, that help reveal how fertilizer is changing the ecosystem.
[TAPE OF EQUIPMENT BEING LOWERED, SPLASHING DOWN]
The Pelican travels a vast area between Alabama and Texas, collecting data points, gradually building a map, dot by dot, of something that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Something enormous.
Sometimes, at night, they lower the CTD into schools of little ocean critters called bioluminescent zooplankton.
GLASPIE: And they flash, um, kind of like fireflies…They respond to disturbance, so you'll be looking over the side of the boat, and you'll see hundreds of little sparks of, like, whitish blue light just below the surface.
As the equipment goes down, Dr. Glaspie sits in a control room watching the data coming in from the sensors. And one sensor in particular, the one that shows oxygen levels in the water, it starts to drop, fast.
GLASPIE: That little line is graphing lower and lower and lower.
Meaning there is less and less oxygen in the water. And where there is not enough oxygen in the water, fish and other marine life can’t survive. Those conditions mean Dr. Glaspie and her team have found what they’re looking for. Not the presence of fertilizer pollution, but its result. People call it The Dead Zone, a vast area of water. You can think of it as a giant three-dimensional blob. in which oxygen levels are so low that almost nothing can live.
GLASPIE: …Sometimes it even goes down to zero and that's kind of heartbreaking because there's really nothing but bacteria that can live in those conditions.
The species hit hardest are the ones that live on the ocean floor. The oysters, the clams, the crabs…
GLASPIE: The poor worms!
The poor worms.
The Dead Zone forms because when nitrogen and phosphorus reach the Gulf, they make plants grow. According to the EPA, most of that nitrogen and phosphorus comes from fertilizer.
Earlier, shrimper Thomas Olander talked about water lilies. But the much bigger problem is the far tinier ocean plants that multiply in huge numbers and then die and sink to the bottom. Those dead plants are a feast for bacteria. The bacteria population explodes, and sucks all the oxygen out of the water. When that happens, all the other species in the area are either forced to flee or die.
That’s why the bottom dwellers are hit hardest. And that includes one of the bottom dwellers that people in Louisiana rely on for their livelihoods: shrimp.
GLASPIE: If there's low dissolved oxygen water at the bottom, that dead zone sitting at the bottom, those shrimp aren't going to be able to survive there.
Which is one reason Thomas Olander’s son might be the last generation of shrimpers in his family: The bigger the dead zone, the smaller the fishing grounds..
GLASPIE: It almost makes me feel like suffocated when I think about what the conditions are at the bottom of the, bottom of the water column
Dr. Glaspie and her team motor across the Gulf.
Ambi from RV Pelican trip, working on deck [under:]
They drop their equipment over and over to figure out how big the Dead Zone is. And it is BIG. It spans millions of acres.
The measures being taken to try to shrink it? they aren’t making a dent. As we saw with Doug Downs, farmers have few resources available to help them stem the pollution. And even fewer regulations nudging them to change. In fact, many government incentives encourage farmers and chemical fertilizer companies to keep doing business as usual.
And so year after year, massive amounts of fertilizer pollution keep winding up in the Gulf. The scale of pollution is staggering: Some years, The Dead Zone is almost as big as the state of New Jersey.
And I want to pause on that fact, to really let it sink in. Because imagine if this was happening on land. If every summer, all the oxygen was sucked out of over 5 million acres. If every worm, butterfly, squirrel, dog, deer, and person across an area as big as New Jersey had to flee gasping for their lives--or die.
Because THAT is what we’re doing to the ocean. THAT is the cost of chemical fertilizer.
