Throughout the United States, toxic algal blooms are wreaking havoc on bodies of water, causing pollution and having harmful effects on people, fish and marine mammals.
Throughout the United States, toxic algal blooms are wreaking havoc on bodies of water, causing pollution and having harmful effects on people, fish and marine mammals.
One of the main contributors to these algal blooms is excess phosphorus that runs off from agricultural fields and while there has been a lot of efforts in recent years by farmers to improve agricultural management, the problem persists and there is still a lot of work to be done.
In a paper published recently in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, the University of Delaware’s Leah Palm-Forster met with farmers in northwest Ohio to test out different incentives that would promote the use of best management practices (BMPs) to help curb the excess phosphorus runoff from their fields.
Palm-Forster, assistant professor in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, collected the data for the study in 2013 while she was a doctoral student at Michigan State University. Palm-Forster and her co-authors—Scott Swinton, professor, and Robert Shupp, associate professor both at Michigan State University—travelled to four different locations and spoke with 49 farmers, looking specifically at farms that could have an impact on Lake Erie, which was hit earlier this year with an algal bloom that stretched over 700 miles.
Read more at University of Delaware
Image: UD’s Leah Palm-Forster talks with farmers at the Paulding County Swamp Nature Center in 2013 (Credit: University of Delaware)
