Lake Erie and eutrophication is a story that covers four decades of time. The phosphorus from agricultural runoff took some time to reach tolerable levels.
Slide presentation that includes Lake Erie (click here).
The point to this is to reassure the need for a better method of providing products to the American consumer and to international markets.
Green Chemistry does that. Decades have gone by since the words of Rachel Carson captured the American conscience. It is time to realize these new ideas make a great deal of sense. Below is the 2016 Presidential Green Energy Challenge. It was not won by a single scientist in a university that Senator John McCain might call "Pork Barrel Spending" (click here); it was a Wall Street company that took the award.
"Dow Agrosciences LLC" (click here)
Summary of Technology:
The demand for higher crop yields and agricultural productivity is ever increasing, and so are concerns for the negative impacts on the environment caused by agricultural activities. Human activities related to farming account for a significant percentage of nitrate in ground and surface waters as well as nitrous oxide emissions. An estimated 75 percent of all nitrous oxide emissions, for example, come from agricultural activities such as applied nitrogen fertilizers and manures.
Crop genetics and precision application methods have improved the efficiency of applied nitrogen fertilizers, but losses to the environment are still significant after soil bacteria quickly convert nitrogen from the applied urea or ammoniacal form to nitrate. In the nitrate form, nitrogen fertilizer is susceptible to losses through leaching or as emissions in the form of nitrous oxide. Furthermore, nitrate fertilizer that leaches out of a plant’s root zone is no longer available to provide nutrients to the crop.
Scientists at The Dow Chemical Company discovered a powerful nitrification inhibitor that can inhibit soil bacteria from rapidly converting nitrogen in the ammoniacal form to nitrate, thereby retaining more nitrogen in the more stable ammoniacal form. By keeping nitrogen in the root zone for a longer period during the season, Dow’s nitrogen stabilizers improve Nitrogen Use Efficiency and reduce nitrogen loss through leaching and nitrous oxide emissions. N-Serve® was the first commercial product introduced by Dow in 1974, but it is only suitable for use with anhydrous ammonia fertilizer applications due to the limitations of its physical-chemical properties....
