Rented farmland: A missing piece of the nutrient management puzzle in the Upper Mississippi River Basin?

In the United States, agricultural runoff is the leading contributor of nutrient pollution in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, causing environmental impacts, including a large hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico (Rabotyagov et al. 2014). In an attempt to decrease these impacts, government agencies and nonprofit organizations invest billions of dollars annually promoting and paying for conservation practices (e.g, Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 [H.R. 2, 115th Congress, 2018]). Many of the programs through which these funds are administered may miss the mark because they are not tailored for an important and influential stakeholder for redressing the problem—the person who owns the farmland.