LYONS: Is secret fertilizer report 'tobacco science'?
By Tom Lyons
Published: Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, January 3, 2011 at 5:56 p.m.
Rainy-season fertilizer bans are supposed to reduce runoff pollution from Florida lawns into wetlands, lakes, bays and other waterways.
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The fertilizer industry hates those bans, of course.
And that industry, as the Herald-Tribune reported, has funded research with surprising results. Results that some lawmakers are touting as they fight the seasonal bans.
Turns out -- or so the University of Florida study concludes -- that seasonal bans actually increase fertilizer pollution.
Skeptical?
Me, too. But the theory is that seasonal bans inspire homeowners to pile on the fertilizer the rest of the year, causing even more runoff.
Well, maybe. But Sarasota County Commissioner Jon Thaxton hit it on the head when he told a reporter his thoughts about the industry-funded study.
"It's tobacco science," he said.
He referred, of course, to all those years when scientists funded by tobacco companies looked and looked and looked, but couldn't find any health risks associated with smoking.
In the early 1970s I spent a spring and summer doing farm labor on research crops for University of Florida agriculture professors. No review team contacted me to check on a researcher's methods or honesty. But I could have verified that long rows of carefully tagged corn plants had been pollinated by hand, and plots of wheat, rye and oats had been tagged and notes carefully taken when it was harvested with a hand scythe, and so on. All seemed up and up.
And yet, had I tried later to see what peer reviewers wrote in pre-publication assessments of a researcher's findings on, say, corn blight resistance, I would have been surprised. The reviewers' words -- critical or otherwise -- would have been off limits.
I thought publishing scientific findings was about revealing all, to show that everything is on the level. Not quite, it seems. And not in the case of that surprising fertilizer study. As the Herald-Tribune story revealed, peer review documents on UF's industry-funded research on seasonal lawn-fertilizer bans have not been released, and won't be, despite a reporter's formal public records request.
Did the eight researchers impress other academics assigned to check their work, or did reviewers rip them and point out gaping holes in their methodology? Did reviewers laud the surprising findings, or see signs of cherry picking data to support a desired outcome?
The assessments are a total secret. We can't even judge whether the reviewers themselves were cherry picked. They haven't been identified. Peer review, it turns out, is done anonymously as well as privately.
That helps reviewers be frank, no doubt. But who cares, if we have no idea what they said or whether they were heeded?
Surely Florida's open records law should apply. It is not as if the study's authors were doing dry academic work with no thought of influencing policy and politics. They hawked their conclusion to lawmakers, saying it "should be of intense interest to those interested in developing ordinances for preventing nutrient pollution."
Step right up and buy a bottle. No need to check the ingredients. It's all scientific.
Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361-4964.
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