Plan to protect Lake Erie from algae blooms isn't working, study shows

Miles of green, mucky and potentially toxic algae blooms on western Lake Erie — and the oxygen-deprived dead zones in the Great Lake that come with them — have led Ohio to spend more than $3 billion to combat them since 2011. Michigan has chipped in millions of dollars of its own, seeking to dramatically cut a major source of fuel for the algae blooms: fertilizers that run off farmers' fields into tributaries and on to the Great Lake.

But those efforts aren't working, a new study by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency finds. At least not yet.

The agency examined annual nutrient loads in the watersheds feeding the lake, from 2013 to 2017. The results "show no clear trend of an overall decrease" in most watersheds — and even worse in watersheds most associated with agricultural activity.

On the Maumee River, 88% of the phosphorus it carries to Lake Erie comes not from single sites such as a wastewater treatment plant or a factory, but the hundreds of farms that line its 137 miles from Ft. Wayne, Ind., to Toledo. The Ohio EPA study shows "no discernible decrease in phosphorus or nutrient loading to Lake Erie" from the Maumee watershed, and "the loading in 2017 was the highest of the years reported."

The findings may call into question the costly approaches taken to-date to combat Lake Erie algae blooms, and whether allowing farmers to voluntarily take steps to reduce their fertilizer runoff, rather than government mandates, works well enough to stop the annual algae bloom breakouts. But Lake Erie researchers say it may just take more time for farmer buy-in to begin to show results.

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"We believe it has helped, but it has not helped enough," Ohio EPA spokeswoman Heidi Griesmer said of the state's spending and efforts.

Michigan, Ohio and Ontario have all signed on to a plan to reduce nutrient loads reaching Lake Erie by 40% by 2025, a plan endorsed by the U.S. EPA. "We are not on the trajectory we need to be" to reach that target, Griesmer said.

A dramatic turnaround wasn't expected over that five-year time period, said Jill Ryan, executive director of the Petoskey-based environmental nonprofit Freshwater Future.

"But as Ohio is saying, given the amount of money they had invested, they had hoped to see something," she said.

The toxic algae bloom on Lake Erie that left more than 400,000 residents in Toledo and southeast Michigan without drinking water over three days in August 2014 was thought to be a wake-up call. Much of Ohio's spending on nutrient reductions has occurred since that incident.

Michigan has focused on continued improvements at the Detroit Waste Water Treatment Plant and improved farming practices in the River Raisin and portions of the Maumee watershed in southeasternmost Michigan. A $17.5-million program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service includes $2.5 million for Michigan, and the funding is available to eligible farmers to build riparian buffers, restore wetlands, construct sediment retention control structures and other runoff prevention activities.

"The voluntary measures are working — there are measurable differences," said Mark Mathe, a corn and soybean farmer who also raises some cattle and sheep at his farm in Ida. Mathe is the president of the Monroe County Farm Bureau.

Mathe said he hopes requested improvements in farming operations remain voluntary, rather than mandatory.

"At the end of the day, the land is our livelihood," he said. "We're drinking the same well water as our neighbors. We're all swimming and boating in the same Lake Erie as our friends and neighbors are.

"We all want to be a part of the solution. But anytime you get into mandates, there's more hesitation for people. There's more pushback when you're told you have to do something, rather than, 'I recognize there's a problem, and it's incumbent upon myself to do something about it.'"

It could be that there is so much phosphorus buildup in the soils around these watersheds that it will take some time before actions on the land begin to show up in rivers, said Don Scavia, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability and a leading Lake Erie algae bloom researcher.

"This has recently been shown to be the case in the Mississippi River basin, albeit for a much larger basin," he said.

Policy makers may also need to better pinpoint spending on the issue, Scavia said.

"Our modeling work has shown that targeting practices on the highest source areas is much more effective than spreading them across the watershed," he said.

"It also showed that subsurface fertilizer application, planting winter cover crops and installing buffer strips was most effective. However, this would have to be applied to half the cropland that has the highest phosphorus loss. I doubt that has been happening."

Crops take up almost all of the phosphorus applied to them as fertilizer, Scavia said. "The Maumee may just be overwhelmed with the amount of industrial corn," he said.

Corn grown for fuel creates more than a half-billion gallons of ethanol a year in Ohio, and is the state's second-leading crop after soybeans with a value of $1.9 billion.

There may just be a lag time between the directive for changes in farming practices and their implementation, said Richard Becker, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Toledo whose work includes agricultural runoff modeling.

The U.S. EPA Action Plan for Lake Erie was signed in spring 2015, so any changes implemented from its recommendations have possibly only been in place for one growing season, he said.

"Adoption may start slowly and build up over time," he said. "That would be my optimistic point of view. It's also possible that voluntary adoption (of new farming practices) may not be enough. The jury is still out on that."

The years that pass before that determination can be made might be lost time for Lake Erie, Ryan said.

"If we don't set some sort of floor on how we apply and use fertilizer on agricultural fields, we could spend another five or seven years looking for positive results that never materialize," she said. "We have to go beyond voluntary, in my opinion."

Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.