Lots of news on the Gulf of Mexico "Dead Zone" front so I'm jumping right into the oxygen starved water.

First from the from the editorial page of the Times Picayune, which represents the Louisiana gulf community -- the community most affected by the chemical fertilizers that run-off agriculture lands in the Mississippi River Basin -- comes a call for increased support from the government for conservation programs.

Reducing the size of the Gulf "dead zone" relies on a reduction in fertilizer and wastewater runoff into streams as far up river as Minnesota. Even with the best strategy and execution, that is a massive undertaking.

The National Research Council pointed out that reversing damage to the Gulf and other bodies of water will take years. Its report suggested launching 40 conservation projects on Mississippi River tributaries that have high levels of nutrients so that it will be easier to monitor what cleanup methods are successful.

There are others asserting that we need to change our strategy for agriculture run-off. In this Des Moines Register piece, experts commented in advance of a hypoxia federal task force set to meet about the Dead Zone in Des Moines.

Nancy Rabalais, a chief dead-zone scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, noted that there is no official goal for cutting phosphorus and nitrogen loads in the Mississippi. The federal task force that will meet in Des Moines wants loads cut by 45 percent by 2015 to reduce the zone to 2,000 square miles.

In the Black Sea, levels of nitrogen and phosphorus spiked in the 1960s through the 1980s, Rabalais said. A dead zone grew from virtually nothing to more than 15,000 square miles, she added.

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a huge drop in crop fertilizer use because of price spikes, and nitrogen and phosphorus levels in the lake dropped by half. The dead zone disappeared in six years, but fisheries have struggled to revive, Rabalais said.

Rabalais expects the Louisiana dead zone to shrink significantly in five to 10 years if the Mississippi contaminant loads are cut by nearly half.

"Fisheries have struggled to revive," would be a big worry. If through some Herculean effort we are able to adequately fund conservation programs to the point where they were able to restore balance to a Mississippi River Basin inundated with chemical fertilizers, and if we're able to enforce conservation compliance with those farmers who engage in the practices, we still have the problem of restoring devastated fisheries.

But some are putting forth the notion in the comment section that residential lawn run-off is a bigger contributor to the Dead Zone than ag. That's simply not true.

The USGS identified agriculture by far as the biggest contributor of nitrogen and phosphorous to the Gulf of Mexico, 66% for nitrogen and 43% for phosphorous with corn and soybeans as the main culprits from ag. Urban and population sources, i.e. lawns, account for only a small fraction at 9% for nitrogen and 12% for phosphorous.