The Dead Zone – How Farming is Killing the Fishing Industry

Wilma Subra, southern Louisiana’s own activist-grandmother extraordinaire, was one of the first people to identify the Dead Zone. A chemist, she’d been conducting tests off of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when she noticed a strange dearth of dissolved oxygen. She and other scientists launched an investigation, and now understand how the Dead Zone works.

Wilma explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.”

Fish and shrimp flee the liquid graveyard, but anything that can’t move out of its way – including coral, oysters, and clams – dies. The result is a shocking gap in marine life for over 8,000 square miles (20,000 square kilometers). And with production of corn, a fertilizer-intensive crop, on the increase due to ethanol subsidies to farmers, the Dead Zone is only intensifying and growing with each passing year.

The Lafourche shrimp boat captains know of the Dead Zone because it impacts their ability to support their families. Scott, the head of the Golden Meadow fishermen’s association, says, “You get to places where you trawl the bottom of the ocean and there’s nothing there–no fish, no shrimp. It gives you this disgusting hollow feeling. You’ve got to go deeper and deeper out into the Gulf. That’s more dangerous, and it also costs more money in fuel. It’s getting harder to make a living as a shrimper. We’ve lost over 50 percent of our fleet in recent years. A lot of shrimp I used to see are gone.”

Dean, a fiery shrimp dealer with strong opinions on every topic from the US government to Jesus, tells us, “Last year was the worst of all. The Dead Zone came at exactly the same time as the shrimp season. We saw shrimp jumping out of the Gulf right onto the beaches to get away from that water they couldn’t breathe.”

Prior to traveling to Golden Meadow, we met in Baton Rouge with Nancy Rabalais and Eugene Turner, two of the pioneers in researching and spreading awareness of the Dead Zone. They have known about this issue for over three decades, but have been unable to draw enough funds or attention to it to bring about major change. On a societal level, they feel the government must cease providing agriculture subsidies that encourage farmers to use chemical fertilizers. However, they also feel strongly that ordinary people can have an impact by making simple lifestyle choices: eat organic, and consume less meat (much of the corn raised in the Midwest goes to feed livestock).

40 percent of America’s land drains out the mouth of the Mississippi. “We’re the cesspool of America,” Scott the shrimper says, shaking his head. “Farmers don’t care about us. Or maybe they do, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re killing all the fish! They’re poisoning the sea with what’s coming out of the river from off of their fields.”

I ask Terry what can be done to solve the Dead Zone problem. He shrugs. “All we can do is pray and hope someone will do something about it.”

Carolyn, our extraordinarily hospitable local host, has other ideas. “We should boycott the US fish market for a week. If Americans didn’t get the nearly one-third of seafood we Cajuns produce, they’d quickly realize our worth. Maybe that would help us get the funding and support we need to combat this Dead Zone.”