Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost Paul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Harvesting Chaos
By Jason Mark, AlterNet. Posted May 11, 2005.
http://www.alternet.org/story/21964

Farmers in the U.S. and around the world are likely to face serious
challenges in the coming decades as new kinds of weather test their ability
to bring us the food we all depend on.

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 last 30 years he has been an instructor at
the University of California's agro-ecology 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 crowsfeet
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
said on a recent walk through his three-acre plot. "Each of the last ten
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
are likely to 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 coalmine.

"Some of the changes in weather are consistent with climate change
predictions, and that's real troublesome," says Michelle Wander, a
professor of soil science at the University of Illinois. Wander recently
published a report with the Union of Concerned Scientists which predicted
that within 25 years Illinois summers may resemble the hotter climate of
Arkansas. "By the end of the century, I think we will really be suffering."

The weather changes underway differ by region. In California, which has a
typical 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 F over the last
century. Winter warming in the northeast is even more pronounced;
temperatures between December and February increased 4.4 degrees F in the
last 30 years, according to a study by the University of New Hampshire. In
the Midwest, the springs and summers have become unseasonably wet, while
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 Maplepark, Illinois, 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 tested to develop
new rhythms and systems for growing crops.

For a city dweller who thinks that food comes from Safeway, 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 plan 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
in order to thrive the following 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, Illinois. "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."

Climate change is likely to impact 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 one degree C increase in
temperature, there will be a 10-percent reduction in yields for rice, a
staple crop for billions of people.

But here in the U.S., most observers agree, it's doubtful that climate
change could cause a food security crisis. The U.S. food system--though
highly concentrated in terms of ownership and control--is geographically
very diverse, which means that crops could be shifted to other areas if
necessary. Also, the U.S. 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 the U.S., 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, well 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 the window for farmers to successfully adapt to new weather
conditions is about 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 impact most--large agribusiness growing
operations, or smaller, family-run farms. Some agriculture industry
observers says that the bigger farmers will have an advantage in coping
with weather changes, as they will have more resources to switch to new
crops. Others says that since 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," says Grubinger. "The
disaster will come if people aren't prepared."

Jason Mark is the co-author, with Kevin Danaher, of Insurrection: Citizen
Challenges to Corporate Power. He is researching a book about the future of
food.