NPR Explained Phosphorous To Me.

       This morning as I listened to the news on NPR, I heard a segment that interested me a little more than usual. It was about phosphorous in our waterways like the Chesapeake Bay. The thing is the amounts of it in such places is much higher than it was fifty years ago, by a bunch.
       What the reporter talked about was agriculture and how it's changed and how those changes are causing all the phosphorous in the water. See, years ago farmers raised grain and animals like cows, pigs and chickens. The waste from the animals was spread on the grain fields as natural fertilizer. The grain fed the animals, the animals fed the grain, so to speak.
       But that all changed when the interstate highway system made it easy for feed with phosphorous in it for the animals and as fertilizer for the fields to be manufactured and shipped to the farm. All this made it possible for the factory farms. Now animals are raised by the millions like mass production on the assembly line. But it's too expensive to ship the animal waste to the giant grain farms. Guess what happens to the unneeded waste? It's dumped on lands that already have all the phosphorous it needs or can store. Guess what happens? It runs off into streams and rivers and lakes and Bays.
       Phosphorous is like most things, a little bit goes a long ways. Everything that grows needs some of it, but too much causes a lot of damage. It's like a burger and fries, supersized. One tastes great, but one or two every day and soon you begin to look like one and your arteries are clogged like the Chesapeake. That's the main reason why the Chesapeake Bay is suffering from large dead zones and algae blooms. Oh, by the way, you can't use an algae bloom in a floral bouquet. And we're a long way from converting it to oil. So until we can find a good use for it, we need to figure out how to stop putting it in our waters.