The Mississippi River Basin is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions and exemplifies the multiple ecological and human health risks of industrial agriculture. For decades, significant research and extension efforts have been directed at mitigating the environmental impacts of nitrogen fertilizers. These efforts have met with very little success; water quality within the Basin has continued to decline and the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico has grown in size. We used three strategies to address the following questions: 1) What are the key social-ecological linkages governing the current agricultural system? and 2) How can these linkages be modified to provide a broader range of ecosystem services? Nitrogen mass balances at farm, county and watershed scales were used as a key metric for parallel analysis of social and environmental drivers of nitrogen leakiness. Interviews and surveys targeting a broad group of stakeholders (e.g., farmers, and actors within government agencies, agricultural non-profit organizations, land grant universities, industry, etc.) were conducted jointly by social and biophysical scientists. Our third strategy involved selecting key secondary data sources to study specific processes aimed at solving the nitrogen pollution problem.

Results/Conclusions

We found that key regions in the Basin contribute disproportionately to nitrogen pollution. These regions are the most productive in terms of crop yields and economic returns, have a very high rate of participation in federal agricultural programs and have been physically modified in ways that enable extraordinary yields to co-occur with increased vulnerability to nutrient losses and environmental degradation. Institutions in the Basin charged with supporting agriculture and improving its efficiency are actively promoting practices that are inadequate for mitigating nitrogen pollution. Our analysis of US federal spending on agricultural research and extension found an absence of targeting sufficient to address nitrogen pollution in the Basin and the Gulf of Mexico. Taken together our results suggest that this agricultural system is very responsive to signals which have overwhelmingly emphasized production outcomes rather than a broader set of ecosystem services. That is to say, there is no systematic effort in place to halt pollution, and it could be said that the dominant institutional arrangements in place serve to 'sustain the unsustainable'. Transitioning toward agricultural sustainability will require that the goal of ecosystem services is operationalized at multiple levels within the social system, including federal policies and the regional infrastructure that supports agriculture in the Basin.