Fertilizer from the Midwest's big corn farms seeps into streams and causes trouble—fouling water supplies in Columbus, Toledo, Des Moines, and 60 other towns in Iowa, and generating a Connecticut-sized dead zone at the heart of the continental United States' most productive fishery, the Gulf of Mexico.
But there's another way the Corn Belt's fertilizer habit damages a common resource: by releasing nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas with nearly 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.
It turns out that the region's farms are likely generating much more nitrous oxide than scientists previously thought, according to a new peer-reviewed study by a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Yale, and the US Department of Agriculture.
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