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Simon Donner
447 Robertson Hall Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Princeton University Princeton, NJ USA 08544
609-258-9547 (tel) 609-258-6032 (fax)
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Donner, S,D. Surf or turf? Shifting from feed to food cultivation could reduce nutrient flux to the Gulf of Mexico. Submitted to Global Environmental Change.
The extensive use of nitrogen fertilizer in the cultivation of grain crops, most of which are sold as animal feed, contributes to nitrate loading to the Gulf of Mexico and the development of a seasonal hypoxia. Here I demonstrate that a shift to only vegetable, dairy and poultry production from Mississippi Basin croplands would reduce total land and fertilizer demands by over 50%, without any change in total production of human food protein. The change would return nitrate export by the Mississippi River to levels at which the Gulf Of Mexico “dead zone” has been small or non-existent.
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