NUTRIENTS - CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES

So the cat is out of the bag. Only about more than a decade late. The Everglades Foundation – RTI study report. Nutrients in waters, phosphorus, etc.etc. Haven’t we known that intensive agricultural activities, the way they are practiced nowadays, pollute ? Yes, only thanks to the intensive applications of fertilizers can we hope to produce the effective acre-quantities of crops as agriculture does it now.
And this is how it comes that Phosphorus – and Nitrogen, and sulfate, and other nutrients – run off the agri-fields in soaring quantities and find their way into our surface fresh-waters and even estuaries. Throwing natural systems, and particularly the sensitive ones such as the Everglades, completely out of balance – and threatening our fresh water supplies and, indeed, our very livelihood and civilization. The situation is particularly threatening the Florida peninsula and with it more than 8 million people that live on it.
IN and OUT – a Simple Mass Balance
The recently released RTI International study for the Everglades Foundation only confirms what has been suspected, known, all along. Phosphorus and the Everglades ! Now we have the figures, numbers, tables, diagrams – the whole works to document it. The study long overdue that should have been done by the government a long time ago. But – yes, it is a “sensitive issue” – agribusiness is so important – and so powerful (a lobby) particularly in Florida.
Yet, it is all so simple: excessive phosphorus quantities IN, excessive phosphorus quantities OUT – and right into Florida canals, Florida fresh-water, the Everglades, the estuaries - -
A simple mass balance.
Accounting for Phosphorus
All that more surprising is that all that phosphorus has not been really accounted for. And where does it come from ? It is brought onto the land in truck-load quantities by the farmers – to assist growth. And to be washed off by rain – in field run-off.
What needs to be also mentioned is the “time-bomb” of phosphorus accumulated on the land and in deposits of lake bottoms over the years of using fertilizers.
From tedious long-term monitoring, we do know how much phosphorus runs off the land. Overall, and actually even down to the individual farm areas. A somewhat unknown, yet crucial, factor is just how much phosphorus gets assimilated – in the crops, by the land itself. That factor can vary a great deal, locally.
Removing Phosphorus
So, while crucially important, phosphorus on the loose poisons our water bodies, our fresh water all the way ‘down’ to estuaries. While trying hard to remove it (farmers’ BMPs, constructing STAs) spending millions of dollars, why don’t we control it better ? The RTI report also shows that is much cheaper (8 times !) to control nutrients “at the source” (BMPs) rather than trying to remove them (by the STAs) when they already escaped into the environment.
Controlled Substance ?
If it is so important, why don’t we just simply declare phosphorus something like a CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE – and monitor its purchases and field applications. That would certainly be easy to do – every farmer already knows exactly how much fertilizer he/she bought and where was it put, why and when. If we know how much phosphorus went IN and how much flows OUT in the field run-off – we can complete our calculations, do all the accurate environmental modeling and remove the gross uncertainties that plague us now.
Having a better knowledge of phosphorus quantities, we can meaningfully control it – and optimize its uses as well as its effects in the environment. Easy, effective and particularly – economically attractive.
The keyword to remember: CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE.
And handle it correspondingly.

EVERGLADES ??

Just pave it over !

(The developers' dream - and a possible controversial opinion

- - care to discuss ?)

(The secret solution for the Everglades ?)

Utter Failure - Lake Okeechobee

It is as if we said – just give us a pristine clear lake and we shall show you what we can do with it !
We mucked up that lake good. And with it the the whole of Everglades. I don’t have to use my own words for it, I will use those by Nathaniel Reed* who knows Everglades so well and knows what he is talking about:
“It is the major biological problem of the wholly excessive loadings of phosphorus that continue to pour into Lake Okeechobee. It was not many years ago that the total collapse of Lake Okeechobee due to excessive nutrient loading was considered the greatest threat to the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades system. Look where we are now:
· In recent years, the average phosphorus level in the lake was four times the goal of 40 ppb, and the highest 5-year average in history.
· Loads to the lake averaged 6 times the annual goal of 105 tons.
· More than 30,000 metric tons of phosphorus now resides near the mud surface, covering almost 300 square miles of lake bottom.
· Another estimated 190,000 metric tons of “legacy” phosphorus have been added to the Okeechobee watershed by vegetable farms, cows and citrus – people induced pollution – enough to meet the lakes annual goal of 105 tons for more than 1,800 years ! Another 6,500 tons are added every year ! Imagine ! There is more than six times as much phosphorus lurking in the feeder basins as is what is already in the lake sediments; a true Sword of Damocles !
We have a 2015 goal to reach the inflow targets – let’s stop kidding ourselves, we cannot achieve it ! How can we restore the Everglades River of Grass if the Lake Okeechobee water is so nutrient-enriched that the nutrient-limited Everglades marsh cannot accept it ? Obviously there are efforts to build cleansing cells and such, put the basic premise still has to be treat it at the source ! “
And Reed recommends the following:
1) Reduce or eliminate the continued phosphorus loadings. It is completely untenable to ask our citizens to pay billions of dollars to keep past phosphorus additions out of the lake, while allowing new ones every day. These new sources include both urban and agricultural sources.
2) While we work to stem the flow of new phosphorus, we need public works projects such as filter marshes, innovative new technologies and cooperative programs with private landowners to deal with the “legacy” material waiting to flow to the lake.
3) The massive mud “puddle” in the center of the lake needs to be restored.

Under the current circumstances, even if the watershed upstream of the lake is cleaned up – the lake is so rich in phosphorus that it will manage to contaminated every drop of water flowing through it ! And the so called farm Best Management Practices instituted as an official state policy are laughable when we condone “fertilizer application rates that are 200-400 times greater than the target runoff rates ? It may be best for the crop, but I know it is not best for the basin”, Reed concludes, adding – “I’d consider putting a BIG dredge in the middle of Lake Okeechobee – almost heresy from someone who has spent much of his life fighting dredge projects in Florida wetlands. Could the goop be used to restore depleted muck lands around Lake Okeechobee that the Water Management District is buying from US Sugar, as well as improve Lake Okeechobee ?”
I cannot help but think that he has a point there ! Now what - - ?
Alternatively, we can always pave it over too !

*(N.P. REED: currently one of the Directors of the Everglades Foundation, formerly in the SFWMD Governing Board, then with: South Florida Regional Planning Council, Florida DEP, Asst. Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Nixon and Ford, then Chairman of the Commission of the Future of Florida’s Environment - more than 40 years of top level public service).

VERY LITTLE CROSS-TALK !

- - among professional disciplines (e.g. science, business, media, legislation, etc.). Even our top-notch educational institution are firmly divided into discipline-based "departments", each jealously guarding their individual territories. Make no mistakes - the same is obvious in our industries (e.g. marketing, production, R&D, etc.), governments - and in the life all around us ! Are we so possessive, so turf-minded, basically, so power hungry ... ?
One does not have to go far for examples. Just recently, I was attending a superbly professional and well organized Symposium on Water Reuse - a very controversial and very interdisciplinary field indeed. The room was full of Engineers because it was organized by the American Society of Civil Engineering - not a single BIOLOGIST and not a single SOCIAL SCIENCE person there - and yet, we discussed the most important problem of reused water ACCEPTANCE.
How to make people trust it, use it - obviously a psychological issue. Advertizing people know well how to handle those - a new product acceptance and promotion !
We had nobody around to illuminate us !
So the blind kept talking about light - in the darkness - -
And the Everglades ?
Just see who is on that issue of life importance :
Ecologists, engineers, agriculturalists, developers, meteorologists, hydrologists, biologists, lawyers, demographers, big business, small business - you name it - and, of course, always politicians.
Do we really communicate - and hear each other in the noise ?
Do we even have the same language - let alone goal ?