Agronomists offer alternative approaches to gulf...( d water. Less mobile sea life such as ...)

"The White House committee on the environment and natural resources has posted the reports from the six teams on the Web," Doering says. "However, none of these reports calculated the effects of tile drain systems that are common throughout the Midwest. We just do not have the information on these to make scientific sense out of their impact." The Web address for the six reports is: www.nos.noaa.gov/products/pubs_hypox.html

One of the many recommendations of the committees was that farmers in the Mississippi River basin reduce their nitrogen application rates by 20 percent. According to Turco, the amount of nutrient moving into surface water varies greatly from farm to farm. "If you have a guy who is farming in a field that's not tiled, and that field isn't next to a river and it's not on sandy soil, then that farmer's not adding much to the problem," he says. "Asking him to cut his fertilizer use by 20 percent isn't fair."

More than half of the row crop farms in the Midwest use tile drainage systems to remove water so that the farmers can get into the fields for spring planting. Turco says that this drainage system is poss
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Contact: Steve Tally
tally@aers.purdue.edu
765-494-9809
Purdue University
1-Jul-1999