James Steidle

At the mouth of the Mississippi River, there is a dead zone. A hypoxic zone: water so depleted of oxygen that almost nothing can survive in it. It forms every summer. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered approximately 8,776 square miles. An area larger than New Jersey, sitting in the Gulf of Mexico, producing almost no marine life. The cause: nitrogen runoff from the Corn Belt. The 90 million acres of corn in the American Midwest require synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, produced from natural gas, applied annually. The soil cannot hold all of it. The excess runs off into streams, into the Missouri, into the Mississippi, and down to the Gulf, where it fertilises algae blooms that consume the oxygen when they decompose. The dead zone has existed in some form since the 1970s, when nitrogen fertiliser use on the Corn Belt expanded to the scale it is now at. The shrimping industry in the Gulf of Mexico has spent fifty years working around a seasonal dead zone the size of a small state, caused by the runoff from a crop that is 40% destined to become ethanol. The ethanol is a fuel additive. The dead zone is an externality. The externality is 8,776 square miles.

It’s a curious kind of logic to claim farmers are destroying their soils. That’s like accusing a sailor of punching holes in his own boat. Without healthy, living ground beneath us, nothing grows … not the crops, not the business, and not the next generation waiting to take the reins.

Yuri Fulmer says BC should follow Norway’s lead and utilize our natural resources to help future generations via a sovereign wealth fund: “I think that’s a great idea.”

At the mouth of the Mississippi River, there is a dead zone. A hypoxic zone: water so depleted of oxygen that almost nothing can survive in it. It forms every summer. At its largest, measured in 2017, it covered approximately 8,776 square miles. An area larger than New Jersey, sitting in the Gulf of Mexico, producing almost no marine life. The cause: nitrogen runoff from the Corn Belt. The 90 million acres of corn in the American Midwest require synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, produced from natural gas, applied annually. The soil cannot hold all of it. The excess runs off into streams, into the Missouri, into the Mississippi, and down to the Gulf, where it fertilises algae blooms that consume the oxygen when they decompose. The dead zone has existed in some form since the 1970s, when nitrogen fertiliser use on the Corn Belt expanded to the scale it is now at. The shrimping industry in the Gulf of Mexico has spent fifty years working around a seasonal dead zone the size of a small state, caused by the runoff from a crop that is 40% destined to become ethanol. The ethanol is a fuel additive. The dead zone is an externality. The externality is 8,776 square miles.

Farmers aren't destroying their soils; they're sharing it with the rest of us!

What did the farmers get with the canola tariffs for three years caused by China? The answer is nothing. Nothing, because it's in western Canada. Canada is a fucking joke. All the canola tariff was used for was to protect an eastern Canada fake electric car manufacturing system that so far has built nothing but hot air.