Water quality has been a problem across the United States, and indeed the world, for several decades, as nitrogen runoff from agricultural and urban fertilizer use has increased, leading to increased eutrophication and hypoxia in coastal waters, as discussed in my blog posted in August 2025 (https://www.agweb.com/opinion/dead-zones-increase-around-worlds-oceans). This blog cited research by two marine ecologists in 2008, Dr. Bob Diaz (Virginia Institute of Marine Science) and Dr. Rutger Rosenberg (University of Gothenburg in Sweden), who found that the number of such zones had increased globally by one third between 1995 and 2007. That study referenced more than 400 such ‘dead zones’ around the world. Today, the estimated number of dead zones has reached at least 500. Dead zone water regions are by definition low in oxygen content, which is harmful to marine life.
More recently, water quality in interior bodies of water (lakes, rivers, and streams) emerged as an issue in both state-level and House/Senate political campaigns in certain U.S. states in the run-up to the November 2026 midterm general elections, especially in Iowa, Minnesota, California, Michigan, and Texas. Most of these candidates have focused on the human health implications of poor water quality, and particularly in Iowa, how that has likely been a factor in elevated cancer rates in recent years among residents of the state.
In Iowa, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor spoke often on the stump about the need to take concrete steps to improve water quality, with a major focus on providing increased resources at the state level to help more farmers adopt conserving agricultural practices that reduce agricultural runoff, in terms of both financial assistance and technical assistance. There is ample evidence that Iowa voters support such an effort–in 2010, they approved an amendment to the Iowa constitution that would allow the state to enact a $0.375 increase in the state sales tax, with the revenue from that increase to be directed to funding additional agricultural conservation and outdoor recreation efforts. That vote garnered a 63 percent to 37 percent majority. However, the Iowa Legislature has failed to enact legislation to implement that incremental increase in the sales tax to date, although both major party gubernatorial candidates have pledged to promote such a bill if they are elected.
Current efforts to reduce nitrogen runoff by farmers have focused primarily on encouraging adoption of in-field practices such as no-till or reduced till conservation, cover cropping, and more efficient nitrogen fertilizer application, as well as installing edge of field practices such as buffer strips and saturated buffers, which capture, slow, and treat surface and subsurface runoff before it leaves the property. In Iowa, a survey conducted by the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Council found that farmers had adopted cover cropping on 3.9 million acres as of 2024, and used reduced or no-till cultivation practices on 15.6 million acres. With Iowa farmers having planted just under 23 million acres in that crop year, these practices were adopted on 17 percent and 60 percent of cropland respectively.
However, there is new seed technology under development which could provide significant benefits to farmers all over the world in terms of reducing their need to use artificial nitrogen fertilizer to nourish their crops. At last month’s World Food Prize events held in Des Moines, IA, I learned about work underway at a company called Biolumic which claims that it has developed a process to activate or suppress traits already present in grain crops through ‘‘light-activation’ that allows those crops to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In cooperation with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), an agricultural research center headquartered in the Philippines (part of the CGIAR system of international agricultural research), Biolumic will be conducting field trials of rice varieties in the Philippines using a relatively new rice cultivation technique called direct seeding, which uses less water than the normal flood irrigation practice, thus generating lower methane emissions from rice cultivation. The company has also developed new corn varieties through the same light activation technique that improves the efficiency of nitrogen uptake by the plants in the field, allowing for reduced application of fertilizer and subsequently reduced runoff.
In addition, while in Des Moines I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Howard-Yana Shapiro, a plant scientist who founded the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) in 2011, who described to me the work in developing cereal crops that are able to fix biological nitrogen from the soil, unlike what legume crops such as soybeans and alfalfa have been able to do for centuries. This development is considered by many to be the “Holy Grail” of plant breeding. The biophysical process that his colleague, Dr. Eduardo Blumwald at the Blumwald Lab at UC Davis, has developed is completely different from how legume crops such as soybeans fix nitrogen. This process is triggered when certain bacteria (Bradyrhizobium), either native to the soil or added through soil inoculants attach themselves to the roothairs of the soybean or other legume seed after it is planted in the soil. Instead, this technique has incorporated traits into cereal and grain crops which establish a biofilm or translucent gel that creates a low-oxygen environment on the stalk, protecting bacteria that can capture and fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.
In our conversation, Dr. Shapiro indicated that the AOCC plans to use the new CRISPR plants to introgress the CRISPR varieties into farmer preferred varieties in West and East Afric and then conduct field trials with those new wheat varieties containing this trait over the next few years at multiple locations in Africa conducted by scientists who are alumni of the African Plant Breeding Academy and the African Plant Breeding Academy CRISPR, the Blumwald Lab at UC Davis, Bayer and CIMMYT. He believes that a grain variety which combines this biological nitrogen-fixing capability with the light-activated traits that improve nitrogen uptake for crops developed by Biolumic have the potential to allow farmers to cut their nitrogen fertilizer application rates by at least one half. Such a development, if widely adopted, would benefit crop farmers around the world, also help the general public by reducing nitrogen runoff into ground and surface water causing hypoxia and reduce the enormous carbon footprint for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
