Tag: nitrate
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The simple river-cleaning tactics that big farms ignore
Ione Cleverley wasn’t eager to break up with her tenant, who had been farming 88 acres of her central Iowa land for more than a decade. He was affable and hardworking, but after harvesting his corn and soybeans, the farmer left her fields un-planted. Cleverley had learned that each spring, as the soil warmed and…
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Simple River-Cleaning Tactics That Big Farms Ignore
Iowa is the largest corn producer in the U.S.—and the second largest producer of nitrate pollution in the Mississippi River Basin. Photograph by Amy Toensing, National Geographic Creative. By Elizabeth Royte. Photographs by Dennis Chamberlin PUBLISHED December 7, 2017. This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative…
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Report Spotlights Nitrate Contamination in Drinking Water Across the USA
Photo: iStock/Charlie Bishop Scientists have known for decades that drinking water contaminated by fertilizer nitrates can pose a threat to infants by undermining the ability of their blood to carry oxygen. The condition, known as ‘blue baby syndrome,” led federal regulators to impose an environmental standard of no more than 10 parts per million, or…
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USDA: study finds no-till farming alone not sufficient to prevent water pollution from nitrate
photo: A no-till field. INDIANAPOLIS – A new IUPUI study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture answers a long-debated agricultural question: whether no-tillage alone is sufficient to prevent water pollution from nitrate. The answer is no. Researchers in the Department of Earth Sciences in the School of Science at IUPUI conducted a meta-analysis to…
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Millions consumed potentially unsafe drinking water in the past 10 years
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a “D” grade for the quality of its drinking water systems based on an evaluation of their safety, condition, capacity, and other criteria. This report is part of a project on drinking water contamination in the United States produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program. WOLFFORTH, Texas…
