"Help" like planting a few trees ostensibly to "solve" climate change. And show me the evidence this is better than regulating and eliminating pollution at its sources.
I am not saying it's better then anything but I am glad the article is here. We have a pond on our lake that is feed from run off from a farm field and have algee blooming issuse covering the whole lake. We are currently digging out the pond and trying to improve the inflowing creek to help 'plant filter' the inflowing water. It might not fix global polution but it can help fix my specific pond issues. And grow crops/flowers for free. We offten think of it as polution (for good reason) but you can also think of it as free fertalizer.
You figure out a way to block agricultural runoff at it's source without bankrupting the ag industry or quadrupling food prices let us know. Your next trick will be to figure out a way to pass meaningful legislation in the current climate of extreme political polarization, but one miracle at a time.
We can be more optimistic than that. The clean water act aspired to make all waterways fishable and swimmable by 1983, with carveouts for non-point-source pollution like lawns and fields. Meat producing plants take advantage of that carveout in a particular way. But to achieve the swimmable and fishable goal, the EPA needs to be able to affect any upstream point source. The groups lobbying against this are well financed but they are fighting against existing law.
As long as this runoff does not contain herbicides, I can't see why not would help to clean the water. Is called plant filter and is used on aquariums since decades.
But in winter they will die, so a part of this nutrients will be released again. Trees would be much better for that
The first paragraph of the article is about doing this to harvest flowers for economic reasons, so a significant amount of the nutrients are being removed from the waterways and wrapped in plastic to be sold. (unfortunately, this experiment was also done on top of beds of floating plastic)
Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
> Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
Do you have a source for that?
As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
I used to work with precision ag and fish ecology depts at univ of Minnesota. In much of the Midwest, it is farm upon farm as far as the eye can see. Both these depts primary focus was on reduction or mitigation of nutrient runoff from farms.
But, in urban areas, it is absolutely correct that a good portion of the lakes have issues due to lawn runoff (summer) and salt runoff (winter). The local lake manager said that winter salt is the single most damaging contribution of people in our one instance. A lake in the next county over was devastated by phosphorous from lawn treatment. One next door was being savaged by carp.
Water is a precious resource and has multi vector threats. Where you live it may have a bunch of different problems, but for much of my state, and surrounding Midwest states where farms are widespread, farm runoff dominates simply because on a per acre sampling, farms dominate.
That's very interesting. It should be pointed out that all of NASAs data is open (by law - source I used to work there, subject to a short embargo for phds to be written). So anyone could have the same data underneath. But this analysis is cool.
So, the questions that remain:
1. Are lawns more or less likely to be treated with chemicals that harm waterways
2. Are lawns more or less likely to produce runoff of those treatments
3. Given answers to above is the net effect more or less than agriculture on our water.
I'm not seeing much that answers those questions specifically. It does appear there's regulations against phosphorous lawn fertilizer nowadays. But that's all I can find on a cursory search. I'm happy to believe they both are equally important nowadays.
Those would be valuable to know, but I bet separating the non-point-sources is unachievable. I mean, we may be detecting latent (> 1 year old) hydrological concentrations from the combination of lawn, ag, failing septic tanks, and point sources that conveniently become non-point.
On that last source: the design is to concentrate liquid manure, which as a point source is a liability, and spray it over an area. I believe this makes it a non-point-source for the purposes of carveouts in the clean water act.
> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:
“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”
Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:
"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."
128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.
But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.
Yeah for the purposes of runoff, we're prioritizing irrigated area over non-irrigated because of the potential for control. There are plenty of problems in areas where irrigation is not necessary; arsenic in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, etc.
I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:
>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article
By number of acres cultivated, sure. By number of acres that have produce runoff of fertilizers and other byproducts into a major waterway, I doubt it. Also "lawn" doesn't mean grass. There are many alternatives to grass. For my backyard I discovered so long as I aggressively remove vines, shrubs, and saplings during the spring growth my backyard is otherwise maintenance free. As a bonus I get 9 ft tall sunflowers for part of the year as well.
I think the spectral imaging used to support this does collect all mown grass into turf. I think it can only distinguish tall grasses like wheat and maize from lawn. IIRC, you avoid certain times of year so that all short grass is an effect of landscaping.
I'd think that closer to 100% of farms have run off where a much lower percentage of lawns would have run off. Sure, you have the posh neighborhoods where the lawns are chemically treated monthly, but even then, the amounts being applied are much lower than what a farm would use. You also have a vast amount of "lawns" that do not get treated at all. I'm in the middle, and only do it twice a year.
So I'd be very shocked to see numbers that support lawns having more runoff than farms.
> Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
That does not say that lawn run off out weights anything else. Did _you_ read the article?
If you have your own compost system then it can help your own garden. Or alternatively hopefully your council has a green waste collection and it can go there.
warning: this is a UK based view, farming practices are different in other localities.
> Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser.
I get what your hinting at (and your further comments add nuance) but its more pernicious than that. Water management on farms is hard, and has got harder. As soil becomes more sterile, it is less absorbent of water. This means that drainage needs to be more effective, as anything outside of the normal rainfall causes flooding.
But! fast drainage means runoff. That could mean expensive synthetic nitrogen, cow shit, or actual soil is being swept into the water system. As we've had more uneven rain cycles recently in the UK, and maintaining drains/ditches has got a lot less expensive, the effectiveness of farm drainage has increase significantly. This means flash flooding down stream and also more reliance on pumped water.
But, it also means soil degradation, which requires more shit to be put in, which then runs off.
There are ways to tackle this, but it requires investment from the academic world to prove it works for the varied UK farm lands, Subsidies changes from UK gov (which they've already royally fucked up) and cost benefit analysis made available to farmers. Water dwell time needs to increase significantly in most of the UK, not only to reduce flooding, but to also improve drought resistance. The side effect is that it reduces fertiliser runoff.
A sterile soil is something that has been weed-killed to make sure no other plants grow on it. Thats useful for growing sensitive crops like wheat/potatoes etc, as they tend to be dwarfs and can easily be out competed/shaded by other plants. Its also used when changing from one crop to another at the end of a season. This prevents crops being contaminated by previous rotation
The downside is that it also kills off the mechanisms that make soil hang together, like fungi, fibrous roots, moss. That process creates a spongy interlinked mesh that separates soil from something like raw clay/sand. think carbon/glass fibre vs raw epoxy.
Anyway, those fibres of organic matter decay/get eaten by insects, worms and fungi. This "airates" the soil by leaving voids, making it much less dense. This provides much more surface area (and holes) for water to soak into.
A lot of people have been experimenting with soil regenerative practices such as no-till, no-spray, cover crops, and rotational grazing. Not only does it retain more water, but you stop needing to add fertilizer and thus not have runoff anyway.
There's also studies in replenishing soil microbes. I was involved in prelim discussions on producing a documentary on this that never moved past those initial talks. I was really hoping to work on that to see how effective they were.
Here in Austin, Texas, we're lucky to have Ladybird (Town) Lake downtown. For most of the year, algae blooms are so severe that it's not safe for people or dogs to swim in the lake. It drives me crazy that people consider this anything other than anthropogenic.
I would love to see any effort to filter out urban water pollution. And I commend any change in the narrative that undesirable populations of blue/green algae, zebra mussels, etc. are inexplicable inconveniences, instead of what they really are: opportunistic growths driven by human water pollution and a warming climate.
This was worked out ages ago by John Todd in his work on what he calls "Living Machines"
> Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes.
> John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models.
Very interesting - thank you for sharing his work. From my very cursory glance at Todd Ecological's homepage, their projects look scaled to individual residential and commercial wastewater filtration applications. I was hoping to see examples of filtration systems that would scale to entire regional watersheds, such as urban lakes.
In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.
I would assume that these methods, based as they are on living ecosystems (which are all about scaling: every species is capable of exponential growth), that these scale well.
In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied"
John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells
> The five case studies
presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of
water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an
agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in
Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater
standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment
process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate
from an adjacent landfill. ...
38 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] threadBut in winter they will die, so a part of this nutrients will be released again. Trees would be much better for that
Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
Do you have a source for that?
As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/
I used to work with precision ag and fish ecology depts at univ of Minnesota. In much of the Midwest, it is farm upon farm as far as the eye can see. Both these depts primary focus was on reduction or mitigation of nutrient runoff from farms.
But, in urban areas, it is absolutely correct that a good portion of the lakes have issues due to lawn runoff (summer) and salt runoff (winter). The local lake manager said that winter salt is the single most damaging contribution of people in our one instance. A lake in the next county over was devastated by phosphorous from lawn treatment. One next door was being savaged by carp.
Water is a precious resource and has multi vector threats. Where you live it may have a bunch of different problems, but for much of my state, and surrounding Midwest states where farms are widespread, farm runoff dominates simply because on a per acre sampling, farms dominate.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Lawn/lawn2.php
Looks like Visual Capitalist is just hosting maps from McHarg, https://mcharg.upenn.edu/
I don’t know if McHarg collects data that can be compared with NASA.
So, the questions that remain:
1. Are lawns more or less likely to be treated with chemicals that harm waterways
2. Are lawns more or less likely to produce runoff of those treatments
3. Given answers to above is the net effect more or less than agriculture on our water.
I'm not seeing much that answers those questions specifically. It does appear there's regulations against phosphorous lawn fertilizer nowadays. But that's all I can find on a cursory search. I'm happy to believe they both are equally important nowadays.
On that last source: the design is to concentrate liquid manure, which as a point source is a liability, and spray it over an area. I believe this makes it a non-point-source for the purposes of carveouts in the clean water act.
If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:
“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”
Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:
"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."
128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.
But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.
Total [1]https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-...
I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:
https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxvi/8-w27/milesi.pdf
>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article
Link rot is kicking in.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160330015359/http://sciencelin...
So I'd be very shocked to see numbers that support lawns having more runoff than farms.
I feel like I'm the only person here who read it.
> Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
That does not say that lawn run off out weights anything else. Did _you_ read the article?
Also, plenty of florists use paper wrappers, there's no particular reason to prefer plastic.
Well, I can, it's not a massive expense compared to containing it.
Depending on who owns the nearby waterways, the farmers could be incentivised to float recollection furniture which benefits all.
> Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser.
I get what your hinting at (and your further comments add nuance) but its more pernicious than that. Water management on farms is hard, and has got harder. As soil becomes more sterile, it is less absorbent of water. This means that drainage needs to be more effective, as anything outside of the normal rainfall causes flooding.
But! fast drainage means runoff. That could mean expensive synthetic nitrogen, cow shit, or actual soil is being swept into the water system. As we've had more uneven rain cycles recently in the UK, and maintaining drains/ditches has got a lot less expensive, the effectiveness of farm drainage has increase significantly. This means flash flooding down stream and also more reliance on pumped water.
But, it also means soil degradation, which requires more shit to be put in, which then runs off.
There are ways to tackle this, but it requires investment from the academic world to prove it works for the varied UK farm lands, Subsidies changes from UK gov (which they've already royally fucked up) and cost benefit analysis made available to farmers. Water dwell time needs to increase significantly in most of the UK, not only to reduce flooding, but to also improve drought resistance. The side effect is that it reduces fertiliser runoff.
The downside is that it also kills off the mechanisms that make soil hang together, like fungi, fibrous roots, moss. That process creates a spongy interlinked mesh that separates soil from something like raw clay/sand. think carbon/glass fibre vs raw epoxy.
Anyway, those fibres of organic matter decay/get eaten by insects, worms and fungi. This "airates" the soil by leaving voids, making it much less dense. This provides much more surface area (and holes) for water to soak into.
does that make sense?
I would love to see any effort to filter out urban water pollution. And I commend any change in the narrative that undesirable populations of blue/green algae, zebra mussels, etc. are inexplicable inconveniences, instead of what they really are: opportunistic growths driven by human water pollution and a warming climate.
> Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes.
https://www.toddecological.com/about
- - - -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M- - - -
John Todd, Living Machines
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute
> John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU
- - - -
John Todd - The Ecological Design Revolution
Bioneers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8
In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.
In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied"
John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells
> The five case studies presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate from an adjacent landfill. ...
https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalD...
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint_oil_spill