Student: Maddy Frawley
Graduation date: May 2018
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2015
Go to concentration landing page
Summary
Growing up on the edge of the Mississippi River and spending time travelling along its veins has given me a strong cultural connection to the agricultural industry in the United States. As a child, I visited the headwaters of the Mississippi in Itasca, Minnesota, where I first realized the significance and immense size of the river. I remember throwing a stick in the water and watching it float down with the current, and my mom telling me that the stick would float all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. About a decade later, I visited New Orleans, and saw the tail of the same river I had grown up on. Here, the mouth of the Mississippi held water that had seen 2,320 miles of anthropogenic impact as it made its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. This striking difference seen firsthand, in conjunction with my long-lived interest in nutrition and food production, has lead to my interest in studying the agriculture industry and agricultural runoff in river watersheds throughout the world. In order to study this, I will be focusing on agricultural runoff.
Agricultural runoff is defined as the flow of water through farming areas from precipitation or irrigation sources that can pick up nutrients stored in fertilizers, pesticides, or sediments and deposit them into nearby water sources (US EPA 2015). These pollutants can cause many problems such as damaged aquatic ecosystems, shortage of potable water, or even hypoxia (Rabalais et. al 2002). Technology has made it possible to grow crops nearly anywhere, and as a result the externalities of food production are hard to control. Watersheds have been facing the impacts of runoff from farms increasingly since the green revolution in the mid-twentieth century, which included a large shift to industrial agriculture techniques (Rabalais et. al 2002). The interconnectivity of watersheds makes this water pollution problem to be especially contagious and difficult to pinpoint. A large part of my research will be on the change of the agricultural industry and its effect on runoff, and the actions being taken on a legal scale to help prevent or correct the externalities of nonpoint source water pollution.
Agricultural runoff problems exist in many river basins around the world. Societies surrounding China’s Yellow River are currently experiencing a “quality-driven water shortage” (Ivanova 2013). This has been mainly attributed to the agriculture surrounding the river, which is known as China’s “cradle of civilization” due to it being the hub of agriculture and the birthplace of civilization in China. The Yellow river is prone to frequent flooding, which makes it especially vulnerable to pollution via runoff. I hope to compare the different health statuses of the Yellow River and the Mississippi to analyze how different levels of “crisis” affect the the extent of action being taken on water pollution within a given river. The Nile river, regarded as the longest river in the world, has more recently been experiencing problems with pollution as a result of irrigation drainage. The Nile is unique from the Mississippi for a lot of reasons, but I would like to focus on the idea that it runs through many different countries. I hope to look at how the different governmental systems within these countries affects how they handle irrigation pollution in comparison to how the United States handles this pollution. The river does not show high enough pollution levels to have significant health effects, but increasing trends of nutrient loading to the Nile could lead to health risks in the near future (Gohary 2015). In the Danube river, the largest river in Europe, mitigation techniques have been developed and enforced to try to combat nitrate runoff to the river. The World Wildlife Foundation is working with Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to restore floodplains to limit irrigation pollution to the river (EEB 2012). I will be doing more research on the Danube to see what results this new policy is creating, and if similar methods could be applied to the Mississippi. The analysis of other major river basins is essential to framing the topic of agricultural water pollution in the Mississippi river.
I have chosen to focus on the Mississippi River basin for several reasons. First, the Mississippi provides an interesting case study because the vast majority of the agricultural product for the entire country in which it lies comes from areas surrounding the river, and water is essential to the progression of this land. Second, most of the agriculture lies along the Northern half of the river, while the effects of the runoff are stronger in the Southern half, especially the Gulf of Mexico. Third, agricultural runoff in the United States is an issue that has been worked on and researched extensively, and many methods of mitigation have been tested. The Mississippi can be contextualized in its advancement of water degradation through comparison to these three rivers in different stages of agricultural industrialization and hydrologic health. Finally, I have chosen to focus on one primary river because it will allow me to go more in depth analyzing this large topic, and look at a variety of factors that influence and result from this issue.
I am curious about the different actors involved in the economic, ecological, political, and cultural stakes that come with water degradation in the Mississippi. For example, hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico has caused a huge economic strain on small fisheries, which are also a large part of the culture in the Gulf region (Rabalais 2002). Additionally, nutrient loading to the Mississippi River watershed has been known to cause health problems within rural communities, such as “blue-baby syndrome” caused by excess nitrogen in water near farms (Raymond et. al 2008). I would like to look at case studies of different groups that are most largely affected by water degradation, and who is being addressed and who is not. This will lead into a discussion about the intrinsic value of water, and how this can change when societies experience different levels of water security and economic vulnerability.
Finally, I will be looking at different methods that have been experimented with to remedy agricultural pollution, everywhere from preventing to repairing damage to watersheds. Many new techniques have been tested, such as creating artificial wetlands to use as buffers to water pollution in the southern Mississippi River, or extracting nitrogen from water and putting it back into soils in the Midwest (Diebel et. al 2008). Each of these solutions has its own set of costs and benefits in relation to the agriculture market that I will evaluate to develop an understanding of the complication of the issue. This will frame the future of the topic of agricultural runoff and what can be expected or changed to aid the problem in the United States.
Works Cited
Borbor-Cordova, Mercy J., Elizabeth W. Boyer, William H. McDowell, and Charles A. Hall. 2006. “Nitrogen and Phosphorus Budgets for a Tropical Watershed Impacted by Agricultural Land Use: Guayas, Ecuador.” Biogeochemistry 79 (1-2): 135–61.
Diebel, Matthew W., Jeffrey T. Maxted, Peter J. Nowak, and M. Jake Vander Zanden. 2008. “Landscape Planning for Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution Reduction I: A Geographical Allocation Framework.” Environmental Management 42 (5): 789–802.
“Ten Rivers: A Review of Europe’s New Water Protection.” Brussels, Belgium: European Environmental Bureau, 2012.
Gohary, Rasha El. 2015. “Agriculture, Industry, and Wastewater in the Nile Delta.” International Journal of Scientific Research in Agricultural Sciences 2: 159–72.
Liu, G. D., W. L. Wu, and J. Zhang. 2005. “Regional Differentiation of Non-Point Source Pollution of Agriculture-Derived Nitrate Nitrogen in Groundwater in Northern China.” Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 107 (2–3): 211–20.
MacDonald, James M., Penni Korb, and Robert A. Hoppe. 2013. “Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming.” U.S. Department of Agriculture (August).
Rabalais, Nancy N., R. Eugene Turner, and William J. Wiseman Jr. 2002. “Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia, A.k.a. ‘The Dead Zone.’” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33 (January): 235–63.
Raymond, Peter A., Neung-Hwan Oh, R. Eugene Turner, and Whitney Broussard. 2008. “Anthropogenically Enhanced Fluxes of Water and Carbon from the Mississippi River.” Nature 451 (7177): 449–52.
US EPA, OW. 2015. “Agricultural Nonpoint Source Fact Sheet.” Accessed October 6.
Questions
- Descriptive: How has the agricultural industry in America’s Heartland shifted over time? What kind of legislation exists surrounding nonpoint source nutrient loading to the Mississippi, as compared to legislation in other countries such as China and Egypt? How does water quality in the Mississippi River compare with that of similar sized rivers, and how do these different levels of water degradation impact societies?
- Explanatory: How do political influences drive agricultural pollution, specifically in regards to the conservative nature of the states that surround the drainage of the Mississippi River? What makes agricultural water pollution difficult to control, in spite of all the attention it has been receiving by organizations such as the EPA? What role does economic vulnerability play in the impact of hypoxia at the mouth of the Mississippi River?
- Evaluative: How does runoff affect the health of Americans who live in the Mississippi river watershed through use of its water and bioaccumulation in Mississippi River species consumption, and how does this compare to the health effects of water pollution in other areas? How does the hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico change the productivity and techniques used by fisheries in the area? How can the model demonstrated by the European Environmental Bureau be adopted and readjusted to fit the needs of other rivers around the world?
- Instrumental: What kind of economic incentives or social practices can be used to encourage mitigation of agricultural runoff in the Mississippi, and what kind of mitigation processes should be encouraged? In what ways could legislation surrounding livestock, crop, and fish farms be better enforced along the Mississippi River watershed? Considering the complexity of nonpoint source pollution, how do we balance the economic and ecological needs of food producers, their livestock and crops, and the larger consumers of agricultural products?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 460 (Environmental Law & Policy, 4 credits), fall 2016. Discusses policy surrounding environmental issues to help answer questions about the influence of politics on water pollution issues.
- GEO 280 (Fundamentals of Hydrology, 4 credits), spring 2016. Explains the properties of the water cycle and the way things may be carried through a watershed.
- GEO 340 (Spatial Problems in Earth Systems Science, 5 credits), fall 2017. Teaches spatial analysis skills using technology that will help me to analyze the Mississippi River watershed and some of its influences.
- ENVS 499 (Independent Study, 4 credits), 2 credits before and after spring 2017. Independent concentration research on agricultural runoff during my overseas program in Ecuador.
- POLS 307 (Government and the Economy, 4 credits), fall 2017. Analyzes the US government and how policy making is influenced by the economy. Specifically addresses agriculture and natural resource management, which will help me understand the complexity of agricultural runoff along the Mississippi River.
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape), fall 2016. Discusses the change of the american landscape and the agricultural industry overtime.