It s Been 6 Years Since Illinois Set Out To Improve Water Quality So Far, Farm Runoff Is Worse stlpublicradio.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from stlpublicradio.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
/
Rothermel does what he can to reduce his nutrient runoff, including planting cover crops on 800 of his 1,100 corn and soybean acres and utilizing reduced-tillage methods.
“After farming for a couple of years and just looking around at what s happening, I just decided there has to be a better way to farm than just continually pouring more and more inputs into the field,” Rothermel says. “Soil is a finite resource, and I just decided that we need to maintain it.”
But, despite his and other farmers’ efforts, agriculture is among the largest contributors to the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxic zone, which is inhabitable for fish and other marine life. In hopes of reducing the size of the dead zone, many Mississippi River basin states, including Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, have adopted strategies to cut down on nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into local waterways.
HARVEST PUBLIC MEDIA Water runs off a central Illinois farm into the East Branch Embarras River through a tile drainage pipe.
When it rains on Joe Rothermel’s central Illinois farm, most of the water drains into the nearby East Branch Embarras River. There, it begins a journey south through the Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. As it flows through more and more farmland, fertilizer runoff which once nourished crops compounds the water’s nutrient load, resulting in a dead zone off the coast of Texas and Louisiana.
Rothermel does what he can to reduce his nutrient runoff, including planting cover crops on 800 of his 1,100 corn and soybean acres and utilizing reduced-tillage methods.“After farming for a couple of years and just looking around at what s happening, I just decided there has to be a better way to farm than just continually pouring more and more inputs into the field,” Rothermel says. “Soil is a finite resource, and I just decided that we need