Today after dinner we went out to the barn to watch “Ocean Frontiers; The Dawn of A new Era in Ocean Stewardship” and receive input from both Denny Friest and Dean Lemke. Denny, was included in the documentary because he was one of the first Iowa farmers to start using significantly less nitrogen fertilizer in his fields. This discussion of the value of nitrogen and phosphorous to farmers as a fertilizer versus the detriment that the nitrogen and phosphorous cause downstream of the Mississippi river in the Gulf of Mexico led me to an interesting query.  In Des Moines and Iowa City, the city water which is taken from the Mississippi, is filtered to remove the dissolved nitrogen to prevent the health problems that over-consumption can causes, such as ‘blue baby,’ which can interfere with the oxygen-carrying ability of infants blood. Yet, despite our evident ability to remove dissolved nitrogen from water, we have elected to use wetlands and natural borders on croplands in order to naturally filter it, and insist on the use of less nitrogen fertilizer in the first place. Why though, are we doing this? These natural acres, man-made wetlands, and natural borders on cropland take up the precious fertile and expensive Iowa land so necessary for crop growth. As our population ever increases simultaneously with our appreciation for nature and our dislike of its destruction, surely we will be required to produce as many bushels of seed crops and as many lbs of meat as possible on as few acres as we have now. With this lack of available land for expansion, why are we giving cropland ‘back to nature,’ when we have so little of it to begin with? Why have we not placed these nitrogen filters sporadically throughout the Mississippi River? Or at least at the places where the tiles join the creeks? Is it because a cost efficient filtering unit has not been brought forward to individual farmers? Is it because states along the Mississippi don’t want to work together? No matter the reason, the solution seems simple and I hope that we can work towards fixing it, if even with the introduction of a smaller filtration unit produced by a university such as ours.