Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
exemplify politically useful.
16
Congressional leaders have protected agri-
culture from environmental regulation, even as this sector is increasingly
responding to the wishes of vertically integrated transnational corpora-
tions.
17
Congress has never given the USEPA a clear mandate to address
agricultural pollution, even as deleterious effects on water quality have
become incontrovertible.
18
The agricultural practices shaping the quantity, media, and impacts of
pollution are distinct by crop, region, and specific ecological context,
frustrating consistent regulation and enforcement. The kind of agricul-
ture (annual crops, perennial crops, animal husbandry) determines the
kinds of pollution (nutrients, soil erosion, agrochemicals) most likely to
leak out of the farming system into the broader landscape. Local soil,
moisture, and geological conditions have a tremendous effect on the
severity and scope of pollution, and operation-specific management
practices can result in highly variable environmental impacts, even
within the same kind of cropping or animal production system.
Agriculture can pollute several environmental media: air, surface water,
and groundwater quality, often simultaneously, and sometimes from dif-
ferent activities. Environmental impacts may be temporally or spatially
distinct from the activities that cause them, as is the case with surface
and groundwater pollution. Decisions about agricultural practices in the
United States are made by 2 million farm operators. Each of these
factors presents a significant obstacle for typical environmental regula-
tory strategies, confounding the regulatory uniformity required of an
equitable process.
19
From a national perspective, nutrients such as nitrogen and phos-
phorus create agriculture's most extensive environmental problems in
streams and groundwater.
20
When nutrients borne by rivers reach estuar-
ine and coastal waters, toxic algal blooms, marine mammal deaths,
habitat destruction, and shellfish poisoning can result. “Problem areas
occur on all coasts, including those of California, Florida, Louisiana,
Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and
Washington, but problems are particularly severe along the mid-Atlantic
coast and the Gulf of Mexico.”
21
The Farm Belt's regional discharge of massive amounts of nitrogen
through the Mississippi River has created a hypoxic, or dead, zone cov-
ering up to 7,700 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico. On the Eastern
