The dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico has been continually increasing in size in the journal Restoration Ecology, the journal of the society for ecological restoration this problem is being addressed. Many have blamed the agricultural industry for polluting the Mississippi river with nutrients mainly nitrogen. In the article Nitrogen farming: Harvesting a different crop written by Donald L. Hey is an analysis of nitrogen runoff and some proposals on how to reduce the amount of excess nitrogen. The topic of this article is what are some alternative ways to managing nitrogen runoff which transitioned into the question how can farming to be used to mitigate nitrogen runoff. In order to come up with the data necessary for this kind of study Hey used organizational data as well as expert knowledge. The reason these two types of data were used is because there quite a few organizations who have already documented the amount of nitrogen in the Mississippi river so instead of redoing all those test Hey used pre-existing data. The expert knowledge comes with Hey’s proposals to entice farmers to use the alternative methods he proposes this was likely done by interviewing farmers and asking in order to find ways to incentivise farmers to switch crops. After all the data was collected Hey used a Interval data analysis in order to show how the proposed crops will alleviate excess nitrogen around the Mississippi river. Overall this is a very informative article that clearly lays out the information which really shows the point of just how bad the runoff of nitrogen alone is not only the for Mississippi river but also for the Gulf of Mexico.