HR: 13:55h
AN: B13D-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Surf or Turf: How shifting from animal feed to food production could reduce nutrient loading to the Gulf of Mexico
AU: * Donner, S D
EM: sddonner@princeton.edu
AF: Princeton University, 402 Robertson Hall Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton, NJ 08544 United States
AB: The use of nitrogen fertilizers on croplands in central U.S. is commonly blamed for the increase in nitrogen export by the Mississippi River since the 1950s and the emergence of the large seasonal hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The majority of production of the major Mississippi Basin crops like corn and soybean is currently used as animal feed rather than directly for human food. This study uses U.S. Department of Agriculture inventory data and nutrient cycling models to investigate how replacing the meat protein produced from Mississippi croplands with vegetable protein would affect nutrient inputs to Mississippi Basin and nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico. The results show that a shift to only vegetable, dairy and some poultry production from Mississippi Basin croplands could produce the same amount of dietary protein with less than half the current land and nutrient demands. These changes would reduce the annual export of nitrate-nitrogen by the Mississippi River to a consistently low level at which hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico has historically been small or non-existent.
DE: 4805 Biogeochemical cycles (1615)
DE: 4845 Nutrients and nutrient cycling
DE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects
DE: 1806 Chemistry of fresh water
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting