Historically, federal conservation programs have focused on solving environmental and natural resource problems on individual farms. While improvements have been made in water quality and wildlife habitat at the farm scale, landscape-scale environmental benefits in streams, lakes, and bays, for example, are less commonly documented. Excess nutrients (nitrogen, N, and phosphorus, P) continue to impair thousands of waterways, and eutrophication leads to hypoxia (low oxygen levels that harm aquatic life) or dead zones in water bodies around the country. This report focuses on the Mississippi River Basin.
