The high price of cheap food.

The dead zone was the name of a Stephen King thriller a few years ago about a guy who falls into a heavy coma after a car accident. When he returns from his visit to the "dead zone," he's acquired the ability to see into the future. There's another dead zone that even a horror master like Stephen King might have some trouble concocting. Like King's dead zone, a visit to this one also offers a glimpse of the future--an unpleasant vision of what may be the future of America's coastal waters.

This dead zone, roughly the size of New Jersey, lingers off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In this dead zone nothing survives--no fish, no shrimp, no dolphin, no crabs, no wondrous creepy crawly things from the bottom of the ocean. It's 7,000 square miles of ocean more lifeless than the fiercest desert. The only things oceanographers have been able to find alive in this zone are other oceanographers. What they do find are drifting remains and the tumbleweed skeletons of any creature unlucky enough to have entered the dead zone. Anything that can't find its way out quickly perishes.

The zone's deadly characteristic is an unnaturally low level of oxygen--what folks with advanced degrees and really big dictionaries call hypoxia. Now Mother Earth can be a complex and capricious parent; she offers many brutal cruelties big and small for overeducated homo sapiens to transcribe into wordy dissertations. But if you're looking for a short explanation for this completely unnatural disaster, you can skip the library visit--you need trek no farther than your kitchen pantry. Scientists think agricultural pollution churning out of the mighty Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico is causing the dead zone.

Rain flushes thousands of tons of nitrogen from thousands of acres of farmland into the Mississippi. When that runoff--joined with the "natural" nutrients of a good percentage of the 1.4 billion tons of manure generated by American livestock each year--reaches the Gulf, it feeds an explosion of algae production. These algae blooms eventually settle to the ocean floor and die. It is the bacteria consuming the dead algae that actually sucks the oxygen and the life out of the ocean.

The Gulf's dead zone is not the only spot where hypoxia has begun to threaten coastal waters; it is merely the most spectacular example of the problem. Meanwhile in the Chesapeake Bay, unprecedented fish die-offs and bizarre infectious lesions on the fish that survive have been attributed to pollution from two Maryland chicken farm-factories.

Sandra LaBlanc is not the kind of person who'd say I told you so, and even if she were she'd probably be too depressed to in this case. But for years LaBlanc and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, ([e-mail] for more info) where she works as communications director, have been warning about the varied threats of industrial agriculture. They argue that sustainable agriculture--and the commonsense protection of the environment its methods offer--can do just as good a job of providing America with the food it needs at a price it can afford.

The NCRLC has joined a growing chorus of consumers and residents of farming communities in a call for a moratorium on the construction of so-called factory farms. These "large-scale confinement facilities" have for long been a fixture of the chicken-farming industry, but over the last few years the model has been developed by the hog-production industry, enclosing thousands of pigs into one facility. What has raised the ire of rural people are respiratory problems associated with the sometimes football-field size "manure lagoons"--and the epic stench--that accompany these facilities. The NCRLC says respiratory distress is only the beginning of the problems offered by these large-scale, hog-farming facilities. Groundwater poisoning is another threat as is whatever contribution manure runoff is making to the hypoxia fields growing in coastal waters.

Big agriculture and America's supposedly safe and inexpensive food industry are creating big and potentially costly problems for some fellow Americans a little farther downstream. When one industry creates costs that must be shared by all others, the useful science of economics calls it an "external diseconomy." Multimillion-dollar fishing industries in both the Gulf and the Chesapeake are at risk. Louisiana shrimpers and other fishermen have already learned to avoid the dead zone, seeking their livelihood further out in the ocean.

LaBlanc calls small-scale agriculture, with its reliance on sustainable agricultural techniques, "the most efficient, cost-effective way to produce food." Though a thousand agricultural lobbyists may call it folly, she argues that our industrial model of food production only makes economic sense when its "external diseconomies," its hidden costs--the illnesses of farm workers, people sickened or killed by E-coli bacteria, the degradation of the land, the poisoning of ground water, and the havoc wreaked on American coastal waters--are not factored into the cost of production.

Of course there are some costs of Big Agriculture that defy any rational measure. "How much is it worth when you're unable to drink well water?" LaBlanc asks. "How do you put a price on 350,000 fish killed?"

And how do you measure the cost of thousands of miles of death creeping along the coast of Louisiana?