Every summer a patch of the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey goes dead, the fish and shrimp leave or suffocate, and the thing that killed it is the fertiliser running off the corn and soy fields of the Midwest that grow the protein on the plant-based label.
The Mississippi drains forty percent of the United States, and most of that is cropland: a hundred and eighty million acres of corn and soybeans, fed every spring with nitrogen and phosphorus from the bag because the soil under a monoculture has nothing of its own left to give. The rain takes it. It runs off the fields into the ditches, the ditches into the rivers, the rivers into the Gulf, and in the warm shallow water off Louisiana it does what fertiliser does: it grows a bloom of algae that dies, sinks and rots, and the rotting takes the oxygen out of the water from the bottom up. By July there is a layer along the seabed where nothing with gills can live. Six, seven, eight thousand square miles of it. The shrimp boats steam further out every year to find water that is breathing.
It has been measured every summer since 1985 and has never been fixed, because fixing it means putting less on the fields, and the fields are the economy. The plant-based industry's inputs are grown in exactly that basin: the soy for the burger, the pea for the milk, the corn for the syrup and the oil.
A cow on grass puts her fertiliser straight back on the field she took it from, in a form the soil holds, and the water off a pasture runs clear. The dead zone has never once been traced to a hill farm.
The shrimp that were there are the animal protein nobody put on the ledger. The soybeans are what replaced them.
I love this column, but I can’t let this go unanswered. I, and my family have sport-fished the “dead zone” for about forty years, catching everything from Spotted Weakfish (Speckled Trout) and Red Drum (Redfish) to the mighty Swordfish and Blue Marlin, and every Tuna and Snapper in between. In great quantities. It is one of the richest fisheries in the world…ask anyone who fishes saltwater within 500 miles of New Orleans.
We have the same problem in the State of Florida, but namely in the southern half of the lower peninsula. The megacrop in South Florida is sugar cane (aka Big Sugar), which the US Army helped out by screwing up the natural filtration of the Everglades by digging drainage canals that enabled former swampland to become arable for sugar cane and truck farming of vegetables. The fertilizer runoff causes massive algae blooms in SW Florida estuaries every summer. The lefty enviro crowd (most of whom are vegans) always tries to blame cattle manure as the culprit because Florida is the third largest producer of beef cattle in the USA.
I'm in South Dakota. This state used to be covered with jack rabbits, pheasants, sunflowers, cottontail rabbits.
If you say now that you just saw a jack rabbit some will look at you, not quite believing. Sunflowers gone, pheasant population way down.
Creeks & rivers are dead zones, you'd be very foolish to a fish if you could find one.
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