TECH NEWS TODAY
There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared.
To be a farmer right now—or an agronomist or an agricultural economist—is to recognize how closely those weird weather events are linked to climate change. In fact, when the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP28, ran in Dubai earlier this month, it featured a 134-country pact to integrate planning for sustainable agriculture into countries’ climate road maps.
As the agriculture sector looks toward 2024, crop scientists are working to get ahead of ruinously unstable weather. They are envisioning adaptations for both growing systems and plants themselves. But time is not on their side.
“Plant breeding is a slow process,” says James Schnable, a plant geneticist and professor of agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It takes seven to 10 years to develop and release a new corn variety. But we know that as a result of climate change, the depletion of aquifers, changes in policies and commodity prices, the environment seven to 10 years from now is going to be very different. And we really have no way of predicting what are the varieties that should be developed today to meet those challenges then.”
TECH WIZARD
Concern about climate change outpacing agricultural innovation isn’t new. In 2019, the Global Commission on Adaptation—an independent research group sponsored by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—predicted that climate change would reduce farming yields by up to 30 percent by 2050, and that the impact would fall hardest on the 500 million small farmers worldwide. That same year, scientists from Australia and the US found that shocks to food production—sudden unpredicted drops in productivity—have increased every year since the 1960s, and a research team in Zurich showed that extreme heat waves stretching across nations at the same latitudes—rare before 2010—are becoming common.
If those authors had been looking for examples, 2023 provided them. In the spring, the United Kingdom and Ireland experienced a shortage of tomatoes after extended cold weather in Spain and Morocco cut into harvests, and the price of the fruit rose 400 percent in India after crop failures. In June, potato farmers in Northern Ireland said dry weather had shorted their harvest by 4.4 million pounds. In India, torrential rains left farmers unable to harvest corn for livestock feed. In September, agricultural authorities in Spain said the country, which leads the world in olive oil production, would have a below-normal harvest for the second year in a row. In October, authorities in Peru, the world’s leading exporter of blueberries, said that the crop would be half its normal size. Meanwhile, in Europe, Australia, and South America, wine production fell to the lowest levels since 1961. The US Department of Agriculture revised its “plant hardiness zone” map for the first time in 11 years, indicating that growing areas in roughly half the country had warmed as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
TECH TREND
Those were abrupt insults—but agricultural production has also been suffering under the slow stress of rising temperatures and shrinking water supplies. As fast as precision breeding produces better traits in food crops, climate change takes them away. “For every degree Celsius, the yield of oats reduces by about 1.8 bushels per acre and 0.5 pounds per bushel of test weight,” says Juan David Arbelaez, a small-grains scientist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois. (This is a measure of how hefty the grains are.) “That’s just about how much we gain in oats every year with breeding. So every gain we make, we lose it with that extra degree of temperature.”
An alternative to changing crops is moving them, and crop scientists can already see that happening. Arbelaez, an oats specialist, says that Midwestern production of oats—for human consumption, animal feed, and straw—used to occupy more than 47 million acres. Now that has shrunk to 2 million. Most of the oats Americans consume today are grown in Canada.
The loss of traditional growing areas—which in a moderate-warming scenario has been predicted to be 30 percent of current production—doesn’t only affect the major staple crops. Specialty crops such as olives and oranges are also at risk, and so are the crops that provide the basis for luxuries. Beer, for instance: In 2018, a multinational research team used a model to predict that future droughts could cut barley production by as much as 17 percent globally. Barley is the basis of beer, but it’s also an important livestock feed; the team predicted that a conflict between those two uses could drive beer prices up threefold.
One solution to letting plants wilt under increasing heat and drought is to move them. A study published in 2020 confirmed that crop relocation is already happening. Across the globe between 1973 and 2012, corn, wheat, rice, and soybean crops all shifted northward, escaping the most damaging effects of climate warming on what were their home ranges. But adaptation by migration has limits, says Steven Davis, an Earth system scientist and professor at UC Irvine who helped lead that work. You can, for instance, move a crop in search of lower temperatures but not find the water that it needs to grow.
Millet isn’t the only crop that may be better suited to new climate conditions; researchers and farmers in the Midwest have also been trial-growing oil seeds such as canola and sunflowers, fiber plants such as hemp, other components of bird seed, and even another type of millet, known as pearl millet, which thrives in temperatures that kill corn pollen. They are all examples of ways in which growing areas are being transformed—not just by climate change but by human efforts to work with it and succeed against it. And that does sound like growth.
0 Comments