Solutions

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone problem is not a simple issue that can be remedied by passing one bill in the Senate or educating the general public about it. The dead zone issue has serious social and economic implications that must be carefully assessed before passing laws to help its recovery. However, I will propose a few possible solutions to this problem that consider the social and economic implications of enacting them.


First, a possible solution would be to reduce the amount of fertilizer that is being dumped into the Mississippi River Drainage Basin. 51% of the nitrogen in the basin is due to all the inorganic fertilizer used for agricultural farms. One way to reduce the fertilizer run-off is to stop using inorganic fertilizers for crop yields. The Black Sea Dead zone, previously the largest dead zone in the world, almost completely disappeared in the period from 1991 to 2001 when fertilizers became too costly to use following the collapse of the Soviet Union and many communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Once a completely deserted area, the previous Black Sea Dead Zone has allowed fishing to once again become a major economic activity.

If the Black Sea Dead Zone is now gone due to reduced fertilizer use, why don’t we just impose a policy to eliminate inorganic fertilizer use in the area around the Mississippi River Drainage Basin? Quite simply put, it’s because of money. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the 2011 projected net farm income (the income of the farm minus its production expenses) is around $94.7 billion. Granted, this value applies to all of the United States, not just the states that are around the Mississippi Basin, reduced fertilizer use would take a huge chunk out of the profits of farmers. This is because using less fertilizer would decrease crop yields and ultimately result in less income to hard working farmers. The social implications of eliminating fertilizer use would also be substantial. If farmers are working just as hard to raise crops but are getting only half of the returns from them, the uproar from them would be extensive.

Another possible solution to the problem would be to reduce the amount of livestock manure that gets drained into the basin. Almost 30% (the second largest behind inorganic fertilizers) of the total nitrogen run-off in the Mississippi Basin is due to livestock manure. Because cattle, chickens, and other livestock animals consume plants (organisms that contain nitrogen), their feces contains nitrogen from the breakdown of proteins. Even though a couple of piles of poop doesn’t seem like a major problem, it is important to realize that the massive number of livestock globally (over 20 billion chickens, over 1 billion cattle) makes their feces a major problem. Rain and other natural processes eventually wash the feces into the basin and account for a big chunk of the nitrogen pollution. Requiring ranchers and livestock owners to adopt policies of manure collection could solve this problem. However, once again there are economic and social implications to this.


Economically, it would cost ranchers millions of dollars to hire workers or buy machinery to accomplish this feat. If this feces collection eventually did happen, there would then have to be places to dump the feces so that it would not run off into the drainage system. Socially, the extra time and effort this would take would be large and many ranchers would probably be against it.


There is another option to deal with the feces. Some modern waste-processing facilities have the ability to convert organic waste into methane which can be used as fuel. By using microorganisms that break down the molecules in manure from livestock to methane, this proves as a viable solution to the problem. However, it is uncertain whether the effort to convert this biomass into fuel results in a large enough net gain of energy (energy out – energy put in) to commercialize this.


The Dead Zone of the Gulf of Mexico is huge area that affects marine life, starting from algae to the oxygen-dependent organisms that cannot survive there anymore. It is also apparent that this dead zone is primarily the doing of humans. Although a few possible solutions to this problem have been proposed, it is nearly impossible to eliminate fertilizer use or collect every feces dropping from livestock. Instead, a combination of the two (reduction of fertilizer, more controlled feces droppings) should be used that reduce the profits loss for farmers and reduce the size of the dead zone. A further consideration is the profits gained by the fishing industry with the reduction of dead zone. The dead zone will not go away by itself. It needs serious attention and evaluation in order to correct the damage done which may cost a lot in the short run, but will make our Earth a better place for our future generations.