Source Contamination, Explained
What can’t be measured, can’t be managed. In modern agriculture, understanding how pollution and toxicity occur in the first place is key to measuring and managing better ecological outcomes.
It’s not easy for the public to find out what goes on in the world of industrial farming. Most people who aren’t involved in commodity agriculture only have a vague notion that there are a lot of chemicals used, that they are toxic, and that the intensity of it all pollutes the surrounding environment to some degree.
The most interested people in society flock to orchards, wineries, small vegetable farms, farm-to-plate dining experiences, and farmers markets for information about the food they buy, and a connection to the people who produced it. Some might find a regenerative farmer willing to deliver meat, honey, dairy and eggs, or a larger-scale mail order option with a good story and traceable products, but for the most part… households today are surrounded by urbanization and large commodity grain farms.
The sources of toxicity in food, and the causes of pollution by modern agriculture, are easily confused in the media and by consumers alike. Arguably the strongest example resulting in mis-directed food choices are the nuances between regenerative farming and the vegan/plant-based movement.
Cattle feedlots and other concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO’s) cause methane emissions and excessive nutrient runoff into surrounding waterways.
At the same time, managed grazing of livestock is a powerful strategy for sequestering carbon in grasslands, restoring biodiversity, and optimizing herd health naturally.
People are realizing that a carnivore diet can be better for themselves and for the planet than vegan, as long as the meat comes from animals raised to create beneficial ecological outcomes.
A predominant ingredient in plant-based alternatives is dry yellow peas that may have been sprayed with herbicides just prior to harvest, carrying toxic residues throughout the handling and manufacturing supply chain into packaged foods.
Chemical use on crops is even more confusing and shrouded from public view. Typically, it happens in fields far away from the urban markets that the products are ultimately consumed in, on fields that perhaps only the landowner and their agronomist are paying attention to.
Farmers apply pesticides and fertilizers on fields for distinctly different reasons. Both are toxic and responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, the degree to which can and is being measured and reduced.
Pesticides are commonly referred to as ‘crop protection’ in the agriculture industry. They are fungicides that kill disease spores, herbicides that kill weeds, and insecticides that kill intruders like grasshoppers and moths, applied as needed to prevent other species from hindering growth of the cash crop that the farmer counts on for revenue.
Federal government agencies are in charge of analyzing crop protection products and their labels (specifying the application instructions), and approving them for use. But once a product is in market, there’s no oversight or monitoring system to enforce compliance with approved uses.
Farmers can be tempted into over-applying pesticides according to the thinking that, ‘if a little is good, more should work better.’ Also, some farmers and their sales agronomists have found ways to use certain products for different uses and at different stages, that work just as well to kill things, at a lower cost.
Switching around product uses, rates and the timing of applications is not compliant with the approval process, and causes residues on crops to rise above government-approved safety levels. The most egregious example is the increasingly common pre-harvest desiccation with glyphosate in western Canada and the Dakota’s, which local farming and business communities look away from and never speak about.
Fertilizers are macro and micronutrients that are mined and then commercially manufactured into granular, liquid and gas-based products; sometimes blended, and targeted at the soil underneath the crop. Soils are tested by removing representative samples from across a field, and sending them in small bags to laboratories that extract the nutrients and provide readings.
The nutrient level readings from the lab test analyses are compared to “industry standard” fertility requirements. Fertilizer blends are then designed and applied to top up the soil with the nutrient levels needed to maximize the crop’s yield.
This is where the pollution known as “nutrient escape” happens. Concentrated fertilizer products like ammonia and phosphates are sometimes applied to the soil all at once, to feed a crop that grows gradually over months.
Before the plants reach a stage that can fully utilize the applied fertilizer, it partially volatilizes (escapes into the air) and runs off with rain and groundwater into nearby rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It’s no accident that the dead zone in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico is at the base of the Mississippi River into which much of the continent’s agrochemical crop runoff drains into.