Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/mississippi-river/)
The Mississippi River is clean as it emerges in northern Minnesota and heads south. Then it meets the Crow River, the first major agricultural river emptying into it.
The report shows increasingly wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi over the past few decades, a trend that — spurred by climate change and land-use practices — looks likely to continue.
Millions of tons of corn, wheat and soybeans travel down the Mississippi River each year to be shipped all over the world from New Orleans.
As of April 17, 641,000 tons of grain passed through Lock 27, a canal that runs more than two-dozen miles long and is located just outside of St. Louis in Granite City, Illinois.
Iowa is home to two rivers, the Cedar and Iowa rivers, voted as some of America’s most endangered rivers by the American Rivers organization. Over 180,000 people in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City area depend upon the Cedar and Iowa rivers for drinking water, according to the organization’s Most Endangered Rivers publication.
The dead zone may seem like an abstract concept in Iowa, a state more than 800 miles to the north of the Gulf, but for fishermen in Louisiana the destruction is very real. Harmful algal blooms — the explosion of algae due to nitrogen and other pollutants — occur every year all along the coast of the United States; and they come with a price.