Flaws, conflicts that one newspaper sees in Troubled Waters film

"Troubled Waters" rightly highlights traditional agriculture's role in Mississippi River pollution, but it only skims the surface of the science behind the Gulf of Mexico "dead zone," and it should have explained the difficulties of scaling up organic agriculture, as well as the challenges of new precision agriculture techniques it advocates. The documentary also ignores potential conflicts: Among them, that the film's executive producer is married to one of its lead scientists and that Minnesota man shown using a Greenseeker device to evaluate nitrogen fertilizer needs was a product representative for the company.

-- from an Oct. 8 Star Tribune editorial, "Censorship blights U's reputation."

(The bold type is mine.)

In a separate opinion piece on Oct. 9, professor David Mulla of the University of Minnesota's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences also takes issue with some of the information in the film.

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