Most keyboard jockeys would die for the view
from Orin Martin’s office window: apple trees in blossom,
lines of citrus, dozens of varieties of flowers, and neat rows of
peppers, garlic, and potatoes. Martin is a farmer in Santa Cruz,
Calif., where for the last 30 years he has been an instructor at
the University of California’s agroecology program, one of
the nation’s oldest organic-agriculture curriculums. Strong,
stout, and built like a tree trunk, with sun-bleached cornsilk
hair, thick hands, and deep crow’s-feet around his eyes from
years of working outdoors, Martin loves farming, and it shows
whenever he starts to talk about his craft, as he will happily do for hours on end.
In recent years, however, something has been
amiss in Martin’s idyllic setting. The weather is changing in
strange ways — and for a farmer that’s bad news.
“I don’t know if you can talk
about predictable weather anymore,” Martin says on a recent
walk through his three-acre plot. “Each of the last 10 years
has been anomalous in one way or another. The weather here used to
be like clockwork. Around March 15 it would stop raining. But all
through the ’90s we had rain into April, May, and even June.
If you talk with farmers and gardeners, oh yeah, they think
there’s something off.”
Martin is right. From New England to the
Midwest to California, farmers and scientists are noticing
that once-dependable weather patterns are shifting, and concern is
growing that those changes will have a significant impact on our
agriculture system. Farmers in the United States and around the world
will likely face serious challenges in the coming decades as new kinds
of weather test their ability to bring us the food we all depend on.
The culprit is climate change, caused by
society’s burning of fossil fuels. When it comes to global
warming, farmers — who are more attuned to weather patterns
than most people — may be the proverbial canaries in the coal
mine.
“Some of the changes in weather are
consistent with climate-change predictions, and that’s real
troublesome,” says Michelle Wander, associate professor of soil
fertility/ecology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Wander recently published a report with the
Union of Concerned Scientists that predicted that within 25 years,
Illinois summers may resemble those of the hotter climate of
Arkansas.
“By the end of the century, I think we
will really be suffering,” she says.
Regional differences
The weather changes under way differ by
region. In California, which has a typically Mediterranean climate
with a wet winter and a dry summer, rainfall is stretching later
and later into the spring. New England is experiencing a warming
trend, with average temperatures up 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the
last century. Winter warming in the Northeast is even more
pronounced; temperatures between December and February increased by
4.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 30 years, according to a study
by the University of New Hampshire. In the Midwest, springs and
summers have become unseasonably wet, and the summers get hotter
and drier.
“What we’re experiencing is rather
abnormal,” says Dave Campbell, who farms 225 acres of oats,
wheat, corn, soy, and hay in Maple Park, Ill., land that has been
in his wife’s family since the 1830s. “It just keeps
raining and raining. Last year, from May 10 to June 21 we had 13
inches of rain. Normally we have 38 inches of precipitation the
whole year. Last year we had real trouble with our wheat crop
because it was so excessively wet. We just get dumped with
rain.”
The weather, of course, has never been
exactly dependable — farmers have always been at the mercy of
the vagaries of sun and rain. But general weather patterns have at
least been broadly predictable, allowing farmers to know when to
sow their seed, when to transplant, when to harvest. As weather
patterns become less reliable, growers will be pushed to develop
new rhythms and systems for growing crops.
For a city dweller who thinks that food comes
from the local grocer, rain may seem like an unqualified benefit
when it comes to growing food. Farmers know better. Too much rain
at the wrong time can make it difficult to plant or harvest crops.
Above-average rainfall also contributes to fungi and insects that
can dramatically reduce crop yields. Too much warmth is equally
problematic. Some plants require a certain number of frost days
each year to thrive the next spring. As temperatures warm, farmers
who are accustomed to growing, say, blueberries in Maine or
soybeans in Indiana may find themselves having to either shift to
different crops or actually move their operations to new locales.
Unreliable weather will make it harder for farmers to be as
productive as we have come to expect.
“When it comes to the weather, we expect
the unexpected,” says Henry Brockman, 41, a vegetable farmer
in Congerville, Ill. “It’s not as predictable as it
used to be. It used to be that the ground was frozen all winter.
Now in the winter it freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws. Some of
the models show this part of the country getting very dry, and that
would be a big problem. If the weather got any drier, I
wouldn’t be able to farm as I do.”
Impact on food production
Climate change is likely to affect different
parts of the world in vastly different ways, climatologists and
agronomists say. Scientists at a recent international conference in
London reported that warming temperatures could lead to substantial
harvest reductions in major food crops such as wheat, soy, and
rice. And for years the World Bank and others have been warning
that climate change will be especially burdensome on poor countries
in the tropics, where soil quality is generally inferior. According
to a study conducted in the Philippines, for every increase in
temperature of 1 degree Celsius, there will be a 10 percent
reduction in yields for rice, a staple crop for billions of people.
But here in the United States, most observers
agree, it’s doubtful that climate change will cause a
food-security crisis. The U.S. food system — though highly
concentrated in terms of ownership and control — is
geographically diverse, which means that crops could be shifted to
other areas if necessary. Also, the United States produces so much
surplus grains for animal feed and food processing that it would
take enormous crop failures to create real food scarcities. At
least for residents of this country, a climate-change-induced
famine is unlikely.
The uncertainties wrought by global warming,
however, could be make-or-break for many already struggling farmers
unless they are prepared to adapt to new conditions.
“For farmers, climate change is yet
another darkness in the night, another stress for farmers facing
uncertainties,” says Bill Easterling, director of Penn
State’s Institutes of the Environment and a longtime
researcher into climate change and agriculture.
Farmers are a famously adaptive lot,
accustomed to reacting to forces beyond their control. The worry
among scientists is that if the agriculture establishment does not
take climate change seriously enough, it will become much more
difficult to respond effectively when weather disruptions hit.
Easterling says that the window for farmers to successfully adapt
to new weather conditions is six to 10 years — the time it
takes for researchers to breed new seed varieties suited for
specific conditions.
“What would worry anyone is if climate
change starts to exceed the system’s built-in adaptive
response,” Easterling says.
Among farmers and researchers, there is
disagreement about which types of growers climate change will
affect most — large agribusiness growing operations or
smaller family-run farms. Some agriculture industry observers say
that the bigger farmers will have an advantage in coping with
weather changes because they will have more resources to enable
switches to new crops. Others say that because family farms usually
grow a wider range of crops, their biological diversity will make
it easier to cope with whatever changes occur.
“A large corporate potato farm may be
more vulnerable because they have all of their eggs in one
basket,” says Vern Grubinger, a berry specialist at the
University of Vermont. “It’s very hard to find small
family farms that have only one thing. They may have 100 or so
species. You won’t be in nearly as bad a shape if you were
growing only one or two crops.”
“When you have a real diversified
profile with what you’re planting, you know that at least
something will do well,” says Santa Cruz farmer Martin.
“And that’s an advantage.”
What all agriculture experts agree on is that
farmers need to start preparing today for climate change. Growers
ought to be thinking about what warmer temperatures, fluctuations
in precipitation, and an increase in extreme weather events will
mean for their farms, and how they can respond.
“This is change; it’s not
necessarily disaster,” Grubinger says.
“The disaster will come if people
aren’t prepared.”
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
