[justworkout]

The first paragraph of the article is about doing this to harvest flowers for economic reasons, so a significant amount of the nutrients are being removed from the waterways and wrapped in plastic to be sold. (unfortunately, this experiment was also done on top of beds of floating plastic)

Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.

[verve_rat]

> Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.

Do you have a source for that?

As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.

[justworkout]

The article that's being discussed.

I feel like I'm the only person here who read it.

[verve_rat]

The only mention of lawns in the article is this:

> Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.

That does not say that lawn run off out weights anything else. Did _you_ read the article?

[justworkout]

I didn't say it outweighs anything else. You're inventing an argument in your head. Settle down.

[ttyprintk]

In most states, lawn is the biggest crop.

[dylan604]

I'd think that closer to 100% of farms have run off where a much lower percentage of lawns would have run off. Sure, you have the posh neighborhoods where the lawns are chemically treated monthly, but even then, the amounts being applied are much lower than what a farm would use. You also have a vast amount of "lawns" that do not get treated at all. I'm in the middle, and only do it twice a year.

So I'd be very shocked to see numbers that support lawns having more runoff than farms.

[sidewndr46]

By number of acres cultivated, sure. By number of acres that have produce runoff of fertilizers and other byproducts into a major waterway, I doubt it. Also "lawn" doesn't mean grass. There are many alternatives to grass. For my backyard I discovered so long as I aggressively remove vines, shrubs, and saplings during the spring growth my backyard is otherwise maintenance free. As a bonus I get 9 ft tall sunflowers for part of the year as well.

[ttyprintk]

I think the spectral imaging used to support this does collect all mown grass into turf. I think it can only distinguish tall grasses like wheat and maize from lawn. IIRC, you avoid certain times of year so that all short grass is an effect of landscaping.

[jvanderbot]

This is pithy and needs a citation as much as other responses. agriculture use is massive.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/

I used to work with precision ag and fish ecology depts at univ of Minnesota. In much of the Midwest, it is farm upon farm as far as the eye can see. Both these depts primary focus was on reduction or mitigation of nutrient runoff from farms.

But, in urban areas, it is absolutely correct that a good portion of the lakes have issues due to lawn runoff (summer) and salt runoff (winter). The local lake manager said that winter salt is the single most damaging contribution of people in our one instance. A lake in the next county over was devastated by phosphorous from lawn treatment. One next door was being savaged by carp.

Water is a precious resource and has multi vector threats. Where you live it may have a bunch of different problems, but for much of my state, and surrounding Midwest states where farms are widespread, farm runoff dominates simply because on a per acre sampling, farms dominate.

[ttyprintk]

All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Lawn/lawn2.php

Looks like Visual Capitalist is just hosting maps from McHarg, https://mcharg.upenn.edu/

I don’t know if McHarg collects data that can be compared with NASA.

[njarboe]

> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.

If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:

“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”

Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:

"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."

128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.

But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.

Total [1]https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-...

[ttyprintk]

Yeah for the purposes of runoff, we're prioritizing irrigated area over non-irrigated because of the potential for control. There are plenty of problems in areas where irrigation is not necessary; arsenic in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, etc.

I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:

https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxvi/8-w27/milesi.pdf

>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.

> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article

Link rot is kicking in.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160330015359/http://sciencelin...

[jvanderbot]

That's very interesting. It should be pointed out that all of NASAs data is open (by law - source I used to work there, subject to a short embargo for phds to be written). So anyone could have the same data underneath. But this analysis is cool.

So, the questions that remain:

1. Are lawns more or less likely to be treated with chemicals that harm waterways

2. Are lawns more or less likely to produce runoff of those treatments

3. Given answers to above is the net effect more or less than agriculture on our water.

I'm not seeing much that answers those questions specifically. It does appear there's regulations against phosphorous lawn fertilizer nowadays. But that's all I can find on a cursory search. I'm happy to believe they both are equally important nowadays.

[ttyprintk]

Those would be valuable to know, but I bet separating the non-point-sources is unachievable. I mean, we may be detecting latent (> 1 year old) hydrological concentrations from the combination of lawn, ag, failing septic tanks, and point sources that conveniently become non-point.

On that last source: the design is to concentrate liquid manure, which as a point source is a liability, and spray it over an area. I believe this makes it a non-point-source for the purposes of carveouts in the clean water act.

[Cthulhu_]

So it's more that the nitrogen etc is moved elsewhere. Distribution is probably for the best I suppose.

Also, plenty of florists use paper wrappers, there's no particular reason to prefer plastic.

[stephen_g]

If you have your own compost system then it can help your own garden. Or alternatively hopefully your council has a green waste collection and it can go there.