Danny Deering, Roy Gehrig

The unique geo-morphological condition of the region called ‘bone valley’ southwest of Lakeland in the counties Polk and Hardee offers one of the richest and most accessible phosphate deposits in the world. The exploitation of phosphate is a complicated and long-term process, which has a tremendous physical impact on the earth surface during the excavation phase. The mined Phosphate ore must be chemically processed before it can be used as a water-soluble fertilizer of which Florida provides 75 percent used by U.S. farmers and about 25 percent of the world production. The large scale physical impact that phosphate mining generates on the existing landscape with its accompanying environmental consequences has forced the different mining companies to massively invest into land reclamation techniques - an attempt to regenerate the exploited land back into its original status of a pristine nature. Today, land reclamation efforts developed over the past thirty years have been successfully carried out, either for the creation of nature parks providing new habitats for wildlife, or for agricultural land – in few cases as we have heard, it eventually also attracts interest for urban and real-estate development.