We're figuring out how to produce more food while protecting environment

Last year’s headlines raising alarm about red tides and blue-green algae blooms remind us that Florida is one of the great laboratories in addressing a global challenge: How do we reduce our consumption of natural resources when we keep adding people to our planet?

Florida’s population grows by almost 1,000 people a day. They all need to eat.

At the same time many want lawns. Some Florida residents live in homes with septic tanks, which over time may leak. Septic tank or not, they all flush toilets. They all want roofs, sidewalks, driveways and roads that funnel pollutants into local waterways. 

Because there are a number of suspected contributors to red tide and green algae, there must be a number of solutions. Among these solutions is figuring out how to produce food while protecting the environment that makes food production possible in the first place. That means figuring out how to grow more food with less land, fewer fertilizers, less spraying and less water.

The good news is that the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences has been working with our state’s farmers and ranchers on this for decades. And we’re getting results.

Since UF/IFAS began working with growers in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee, the amount of phosphorus — a nutrient on which algae feeds — in agricultural water entering the Everglades has been reduced by nearly 70 percent.

Farmers have been using UF/IFAS science to improve the way they farm. In the business, we call it best management practices. It means taking the best science we have regarding the use of fertilizers, water and other resources, and putting it to work on the farm.

It does not reduce pollutants to zero. The use of new tools, technologies and techniques have reduced waste, though, while helping farmers produce more than ever to feed you, clothe you, put a roof over your head and even fill your car at the pump. 

Farmers are our partners in making these discoveries. They fund some of our research. They lend us land to take ideas out of our labs and to test them in the real world. They take risks on things like letting us release insects on their properties to see if good bugs can take care of the bad bugs that threaten crops or human health.

Ranchers invite our scientists onto their lands to study how we can keep our state’s cattle ranches as important wildlife habitats while not allowing predators to eat away a cattleman’s living by feeding on his animals.

Our work is far from done. Demands for more food, more roofs, more clothes and more fuel — and more protection for iconic species and for springs and other waterways — will continue to increase in Florida. We must continue to provide the science to make farming smarter to meet those demands. It’s essential to getting past political disputes over how to protect water quality for cities, farms and the environment. 

There’s a public perception challenge in this. Red tide and blue-green algae blooms have captured public attention and prompted a round of finger-pointing that threatens consensus on how to address our environmental challenges.

What the public can’t see is progress in the form of what doesn’t happen — like that extra pound or two of fertilizer that is no longer used on that acre of crops grown for your table.

A lot of that work, like water monitoring, is literally done underground, where we can “see” it in data that reports the presence of nutrients.

It’s folly to think there’s a silver bullet to this type of challenge — a single measure we can take to restore the health of our waterways. There have to be solutions on the farm. There also have to be solutions in your yard, at your place of work, where your kids play soccer and on the grounds of your church. That is, wherever we decide to change the natural landscape into one of our convenience, aesthetics or function.

Public science will have to continue to play a major role in this progress. The marketplace alone doesn’t take care of places like the Everglades or our beaches. We as a society must decide what price we’re willing to pay to keep eating and to keep our water clean of red, green and other colors.

Jack Payne is the University of Florida’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources and leader of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.