Missouri is a Rural State…
With nearly 39 million rural acres, Missouri ranks 13th in the nation for rural land acres- that’s about 87% of the state’s land area. Agriculture dominates our landscape. It also affects our state’s politics.
…With an Urban Population
Missouri has nearly 6 million mouths to feed with the bulk of the population living in urban areas.
Nearly 70% of Missouri’s people live on just 2.6% of its land. The Census Bureau’s most recent estimate places Missouri’s rural population in 2009 at 1,564,967; about 26% of the state’s estimated 5.9 million people.
Because agriculture dominates our landscapes and land uses, efforts on clean and healthy water, clean air, and land must engage our state’s tradition and history of working crop and forest lands. We cannot achieve our goals of a sustainable environment without sustainable farm, forest, and food systems.
Rural Land Profile
Much of Missouri’s rural land is used for cropland (about 13 million acres), pasture land- usually for hay for livestock (about 10 million acres), rangeland for livestock (about 83,000 acres), forestland (about 12 million acres), Conservation Reserve Program land (privately held land set aside to conserve soil losses- about 1.5 million acres) and other uses, including confined animal feeding operations or “factory farms”, etc. (about 648,000 acres).
Like the rest of the nation, the trend in Missouri is toward reduced acres of rural land as development creeps in. Urban development often targets prime farmland. In Missouri in the past decade Missouri has lost 278,900 acres of prime farmland that was converted to urban uses. Much of Missouri’s prime farmland lies in the fertile floodplains of our major rivers.
MO Ag
Much of the farming practiced in Missouri relies on large scale, fossil-fuel and chemical dependent, industrialized systems. Fortunately, we still have independent farmers producing livestock and food crops in sustainable ways too. Missouri grows:
- Corn- 3,325,548 acres
- Soybeans- 4,672,738 acres
- Cotton- 377,960 acres
- Rice -179,300 acres
- Wheat- 881,227 acres
- Tobacco-1,577 acres
- Vegetables-31,079 acres
- Fruits – 15,985 acres
- Nuts-6,462 acres
Missouri is also home to livestock operations annually producing:
- Chickens- 278,336,596
- Eggs- 31,480,177
- Turkeys- 19,164,686
- Hogs- 9,073,46 = 3,101,469
- Cattle-2,089,181
- Dairy-110,358
- Goats- 96,449
Where Water and Land Meet
Agriculture affects broad swaths of Missouri’s land- thousands of watersheds and millions of acres. Our topography poses challenges. All these hills also create streams and creeks that quickly move eroding soil, pollution, and gravel downstream. With much of our best farmland in floodplains, floods pose their own risks. Floodwaters also erode soil, and move pollution into our rivers. And the loss of flood-absorbing wetlands and the urbanization of our watersheds has made even our smaller creeks more prone to flash flood which damage crops, property, infrastructure, and cause erosion and increase pollution.
A Leader in Soil Loss
About 55% of our cropland acres are at high risk for soil loss from erosion – and 48% of our cropland acres are designated as ‘highly erodible’, the most vulnerable land. Missouri still loses on average 5.3 tons per acre per year- and we remain in the top five for these dismal erosion statistics. In 2007 we lost at least 55.8 million tons of soil to erosion (Erosion from urban land development is significant- and undercounted.). Our cropland erosion rate at about 5.3 tons per acre remains one of the worst numbers in the U.S. and nearly twice the national average.
Water Pollution
Our rural-dominated landscape has given rise to thousands of small sewer lagoons and waste systems that discharge into our streams. Many of these systems are outdated, poorly designed, undersized, or poorly maintained so that their discharge pollutes the receiving streams, affecting fish populations and aquatic life. Low population density makes it more expensive per capita and our terrain makes it difficult to create centralized and more effective wastewater treatment systems for very small rural communities. Missouri needs more cost-effective, locally-deployed sewage treatment technologies.
Rural drinking water sources- groundwater and reservoirs- are impacted by agriculture. Missouri has been forced to address high levels of the pesticide Atrazine in some of its drinking water reservoirs. Bacteria and nitrate contamination remains a threat in rural wells in farm country.
Excessive algae growth from manure runoff
CAFOs
Giant hog operations which can produce as much waste as a town of 30,000 people also introduce unprecedented quantities of sewage into our rural watersheds as waste is sprayed or spread across fields. Even though the quantities of waste often exceed that of the nearby towns, hog waste receives no pre-treatment and remains a huge threat to water quality. Hog waste spills have caused massive fish kills in Missouri. In Big Hog country, most of the area’s streams are damaged by excessive pollution. Rural residents who remember childhoods spent splashing in Missouri creeks now must warn their grandchildren away from the same waters because the pollution has made them unsafe to swim in.
Big Rivers
Our state is home to the nation’s largest rivers- the Missouri and the Mississippi- and while their fertile floodplains are ideal for cropland, without proper precautions fertilizers and farm chemicals can enter those waters. Both rivers serve as drinking water for communities along their shores. They also serve as a superhighway to transport pollution to the Gulf of Mexico, where fertilizer chemicals cause a fish-killing Dead Zone that grows every year.
Fragile Ozark Forestlands & World Class Waters
Spring Fed Rivers
Our forests dominate the Ozark hills which are characterized by karst topography- landforms of caves, sinkholes, and freshwater springs where streams flowing along the surface can suddenly disappear underground becoming underground rivers and re-emerge later. Karst systems are extremely vulnerable to pollution because they lack nature’s filtering systems.
Erosion quickly fills Ozark waters with gravel that fills its clear water pools, eliminating critical habitat. Sediment can destroy native fish populations because it smothers the eggs of aquatic animals, impacting the entire aquatic food chain. In karst, pollutants like sewage and chemicals are effectively transported unexpected distances. In 1978, the sewage lagoon at West Plains Missouri was swallowed by a sinkhole- and the sewage was tracked to where it re-emerged at Mammoth Spring, Arkansas 36 miles to the southwest.
The Ozarks are home to some of North America’s most spectacular rivers including the Current, the Jacks Fork, and the Eleven Point. These rivers are spring-fed, clear, and cold. They are home to species of crayfish and fish that live nowhere else on planet Earth. North America’s largest spring, Big Springs near Van Buren, Missouri, pours more than 286 million gallons of cold water into the Current River every day from a complex karst system that harvests rain from as far as 40 miles away and from an ancient underground aquifer.
Watch this video to learn more: http://www.watersheds.org/earth/karstvideo.html
MCE’s Priorities for Agriculture
- Reduce pollution from fertilizers (manure and synthetic) and farm chemicals in order to keep waters healthy and safe.
- Protect and restore wetlands and floodplains to preserve the flood storage, pollutant-filtering and wildlife habitat capacities of these landforms.
- Promote a healthy, sustainable food system that is independent of fossil fuels and petrochemicals, that uses water wisely, and restores and protects Missouri’s soils.
- Promote a food system that maintains a diversified seed stock independent of genetically modified and privately patented seeds.
- Promote the preservation of quality agricultural land for farm purposes rather than industrialized use.
- Promote strong conservation requirements so that taxpayer funded farm program benefits do not go to producers who fail to protect soil and water.
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