Agriculture Evades Accountability, Responsibility for America’s Worst Water Pollution
In 1990, following intensive field trials, a respected agronomist at Iowa State University named Fred Blackmer formally introduced an inexpensive tool to accurately measure how much nitrogen farmers actually require to produce abundant harvests of corn, the most heavily fertilized crop. Driven by concerns about rising production costs and increasing water pollution, Blackmer’s “late spring nitrate test†was stunningly simple in concept. His test focused on one essential data point: the optimum amount of nitrogen …