A recent feature article about a farmer in Minnesota shows that some people really do follow the “think globally, act locally” approach.
Tony Thompson, profiled in this CNN article, has never actually visited Louisiana, but years ago he began to understand how some of the techniques he and other Midwest farmers were using affected water quality in local lakes and rivers where he himself swims, as well as thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. Tilling the land as he’d been doing it, he saw, was causing erosion, and much of the fertilizer he applied to his crops was running off and ending up elsewhere. He started experimenting with new techniques on portions of his family’s 3,000-acre farm.
Today his efforts include planting alfalfa as a buffer along lakes and rivers to uptake nutrients and installing “bioreactors” to absorb nitrogen; one underground bioreactor uses woodchips to slow the water and encourage nitrification. He also applies less fertilizer to begin with.
The Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, is suffering from a dead zone twice the size it was last year—about 6,000 square miles—and those who depend on fishing in the Gulf for their livelihoods are concerned about the increasing effects of nutrients washing down from the Midwest. About 40% of the United States ultimately drains to the Gulf, which one seafood wholesaler quoted in the article refers to as “"the cesspool of the nation.”