Headline : From Symptoms to Solutions: Addressing the Underlying Causes of Water Quality Degradation – Part 1

Read more from the original article on here at understandingag.com.

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Poor water quality has been a persistent challenge in agriculture, particularly due to sediment and nutrient loss from farmland. It is considered a “wicked problem” with conflicting social, political, economic, and environmental aspects that prevent solutions. In this blog series I will challenge the notion that degraded water is something we all have to live with because fixing the problem is too difficult or requires too many tradeoffs. I propose that the reason we have not been able to seriously address water quality is because we primarily focus our efforts on treating the symptoms of poor water quality rather than addressing the underlying cause of the problem. This is a very broad topic so I will focus for the most part on nitrogen management and nitrate leaching, but addressing the underlying cause of N loss will deal with almost all water quality impairments.

Most current N management recommendations focus on the 4R strategy (the right source, rate, time, and place) for managing nutrients in the field and edge-of-field practices to treat water that leaves the field. Vegetated buffers along waterways are a good practice. More questionable are engineering techniques to treat tile drainage water. The logic behind bioreactors and saturated buffers is that nitrate leaching is inevitable, so we should treat drainage water to remove the nitrate before it ends up in a body of water. These are engineering fixes applied to a biological problem. They treat the symptom (nitrate leaching) rather than address the underlying cause, which is poor soil function due to the way we manage cropland.

Edge-of-field engineering practices come at significant taxpayer expense, are only marginally effective, and will never scale to the point of doing anything meaningful to address water quality concerns. Everyone in industry, government, and academia who is honest with themselves knows this. Unfortunately, these practices have been co-opted to use as greenwashing to convince the public that the agricultural community is serious about addressing poor water quality, without doing anything that would require the industry to change. It’s time to move beyond the idea that we can engineer solutions and focus our energy on efforts that will deal with the underlying cause of the problem.

That brings us to in-field management. The 4Rs is a catchy slogan, but who decides what the right source, rate, time, and place for nutrients are? There are some restrictions on timing and amount of manure and/or nitrogen application in some locations, but enforcement is minimal and the 4Rs are voluntary. It’s really up to the farmer to decide what to do. Research on implementing 4R practices shows that they have very little effect on improving water quality. So, what is the underlying problem, and how do we address it?

Read more from the original article on here at understandingag.com.

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