Growing Corn Is A Major Contributor to Air Pollution, Study Finds

Air pollution is the largest environmental health risk factor in the United States, and agriculture contributes in several ways. Fertilizer application, gas use, pesticide production, and dust kicked up from tilling all affect air quality. But the sort of accounting done for the carbon footprint of foods hasn't been done for their air pollution footprint.

That changed Monday with a study published in Nature Sustainability. It was moduled how the production of a single crop, corn, contributes to air pollution in the United States. The researchers found that corn production accounts for 43,000 premature deaths related to air pollution every year in the United States. Ammonia From fertilizer application was by far the largest contributor to corn's air pollution footprint.

"If you want to do anything about air pollution, you need to know the cause," says Susanne Bauer, a climate modeler at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study. "This is an important study because instead of just saying air pollution kills people, it's detailing the specific contributions of different parts of the corn production process to air pollution."