And with climate change, it is just beginning, politicians are going to have to deal with this, an extreme shortage of drinking water, food shotages, rising sea levels, drought, massive levels of snow extreme swings in climate, etc, etc, etc.................. and DConnie Boy thinks it's a hoax!!
11
Forgive me for being cynical, but perhaps it's time for these folks to face the truth: global warming/climate change is only going to make matters worse. Perhaps next time vote for somebody who accepts the coming apocalypse and decides to fight it?
14
Is global warming aka climate change real? For a real deal answer ask a big insurance companies.
8
Missing data alert: the " farm subsidies from sources like trade assistance, disaster assistance and federally subsidized crop insurance" should be properly called taxpayer funded farm subsidies.
9
@tom
Another fact:
80% of the money in the "farm bill" goes to SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps, and other nutritional programs for the poor.
3
19 million acres may sound like a lot, but we have failures on this scale almost every year, for one reason or another.
We have over 2.4 BILLION acres in the U.S., with about 350 million acres under cultivation. This is not a catastrophe.
You can't make generalized conclusions based on one year, or one location.
We have always had wildly variable weather from year to year, even along the coasts where weather is more stable.
In NE Montana we had drought in 2017.
2018 was a perfect year with beautiful crops and timely rains.
In 2019 we had twice as much rain as normal which generated huge yields, but made it almost impossible to get crops harvested, because of the wet crops and wet fields.
My family has been in this part of the country since 1906, and the history of our weather is a roller coaster...nothing stable or "normal" about it.
1
Isn't this exactly what farm country wanted to have happen? I mean they've been voting for climate change deniers for decades. Why are they complaining now? They are getting precisely what they asked for.
8
I flew from San Diego to Michigan years ago and saw flooded fields, many acres. This was before the idea of climate change was in the media and public discussion. The changes are real and have been occuring for decades.
2
It's time to admit that our agriculture policy is completely upside down. All of this corn and soy goes into the processed foods that are making Americans sick. It also goes to feed animals - cattle and hogs. Americans eat far more meat than any other nation. Wheat is a bit better - it goes into cereals, breads, and pastas, but still these are not the best foods. This article also interviewed a sugar beet farmer - another crop that is making Americans sick. The government should be supporting farmers that grow fruits, vegetables, and nuts, but our large corporations do not make as much money on these crops as the highly processed corn and soy-based products. The other dirty secret is that if we switch to growing more fruits and vegetables, we need more farm laborers who are going to come into the country to work the fields, and the Trumpers hate that. This country is so utterly contradictory.
11
Farmers raise our food, and are at the mercy of markets and policy and all the rest of the stuff most people have to deal with, but are also at the mercy of nature.
Nature is reacting to what humans do - so conditions, always variable, are changing into things that drift from the variability that a young country like ours is accustomed to. So each year is going to be affected by weather, policy, markets, etc, but it is important for farmers, policymakers and the rest of us to realize that how best to support farmers needs re-examination, just as how we have to re-think how best to help homeowners harmed by the changing climate.
Re-examine not to throw anyone under the bus. Re-examine to find out what changes are needed to make sure aid doesn't wash away in the next storm. In flood plains, aid to help put farm buildings on mounds, so flooding may isolate, but not destroy. Allow farmers to ride out a flood, losing only a year's planting, not losing structures, grain in storage, livestock, homes. Move to reduce, not encourage, runoff. Use the best research to keep drilling down on how the shifts in viable crop ranges should affect aid and advice.
This was a year of very bad weather conditions piling one on the other. But it's reasonable to expect many of the conditions to become more frequent. We may want to increase food storage in good crop years, and do it globally. Russia lost much of their grain in 2010, think if fellow exporter USA had this weather that same year.
3
The ignorance -- to say nothing of the nastiness -- expressed here is appalling. I wonder how many of you can distinguish between the family farms and the corporate farms. I wonder how many of you ever stop to consider how people are going to be fed when we lose our farm families, when we can no longer afford milk, corn and other vitals.
5
@Leslie Parsley Thank you for this. You are absolutely right, too many comments here seem to be of the form that those climate change deniers / welfare chiselers are getting their just deserts. Even if true and even if it's morally justified (I think not, myself) it's irrelevant as we're all in the same boat here. Global warming will harm the just and the unjust, likely pretty much equally.
If nothing else, this attitude amounts to condemning the world's children.
Don’t worry, the rest of us will pay for it. Again.
2
Hebron, Illinois on the ILL/Wis state lines...69" of rain since 4/23/2019 this year...(normal 12 months about 32" historically ...60% of corn still in fields...we still have large tracks of soybeans in the fields and the calendar is leaning to December...A 64 yr old farmer here said..No I have never seen this and my 94 year old dad never saw it either...have been told some farmers are spending 47 cents a bushel to dry the crop...there is not 47 cents of profit in a bushel...
7
Just imagine how bad it would be if Climate Change wasn't a Chinese hoax! Sorry, I would rather my tax dollars went to buying more weapons.
2
This is a warning that the food supply is vulnerable to climate change. Most likely it will be in the second half of this century when serious problems in the food supply begin to be evident. Droughts are predicted to be worse as are floods. And heat waves are predicted to occur more often and with higher temperatures. Also, higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been found to lower the nutrition values of some foods. And by mid-century the world population is expected to be around 9 billion and therefore much more food will be needed. All the problems associated with climate change have led over 11,000 scientists to recently sign on to a scientific paper that declared that there is now a climate emergency. What needs to be done now is to translate the declaration of a climate emergency to action to reduce emissions and carry out research on reducing emissions. The world leads to gear up for dealing with this emergency. Failure means dire consequences in the future that are basically unimaginable now in 2019.
8
Soylent Green.
I rode through North Dakota on a solo bicycle tour this year and was (as a city boy) fascinated to see wheat, corn, and beets harvested. I had the pleasure of being invited to join groups including farmers at diner breakfast tables in the small towns I rode through. They educated me on the ins and outs of waiting for the weather to be dry enough to get your grain into the elevator without having to buy propane to dry it out. The wheat was fully mature and heavy on its stalks but it couldn't be harvested damp. I saw combines running well after dark when conditions were favorable. I rode on through Montana and Washington State. On my flight back to Boston from Seattle I saw my route in Montana and North Dakota was covered with feet of snow. Mr. McDougall's farm is well north of my route, close to the Canada border, and it sounds like he got walloped with that snowfall before his wheat was in, unfortunately. Farming is a risky business on a grand scale, and it's what feeds us.
7
It appears for mid-latitude states that a changed climate will result in a more variable jet stream and, hence, more problematic farming. But I think the problem of variability can be partly solved by better climate models. By pushing our climate models toward ever increasing nodalization and incorporation of regional physical feedbacks, we can at least give farmers a probabilistic range for their growing season climate before it's upon them, rather like the models that help them prepare for economic variables (price per bushel, etc). We have, quite obviously, not taken the source of climate change seriously enough. The least our gov't can do is offer better predictions for those whose income relies on atmosphere and ocean conditions.
Fossil propaganda has led many Americans to think climate models are somehow different than other physical models of complex systems, like car engines, or jet airplanes. Not true. We need to support the modelers of this purely physical phenomenon, so they can provide the guidance our farmers and fishermen need. Climate models aren't perfect. Anyone who has flown in a Boeing 737 MAX must know: neither are aircraft models. They are just the best we have.
1
Quoting from a friend who does permaculture:
"Modern Ag works to drain water out of the crop field as quickly as possible to enable a dry field for growing and moving machinery. From a field to a ditch to a creek to a river. I get it. Modern Ag needs to redesign and figure out how to retain the rain on site instead of sending it downstream. It’s a big task but if we figured out how to remove it we should be smart enough to use the design approach to keep it on site. Cover crops is one of those methods." I, myself, feel like there are many more ways that permaculture and regenerative agriculture can solve these problems. In addition, the type of agriculture I am touting sequesters carbon helps mitigate global climate change.
4
Can we please give a rest to assuming everyone in all these states is a Trumpster or even a Republican? Way to make people stop paying attention.
That said, thanks for an excellent presentation, and most particularly for the fabulous linked mapping of the floods from earlier.
As for the swarm of ignorant comments, be aware that opposition is organized and does not necessarily represent a broad sample of people's opinions.
However, anyone denying the science and evidence of climate change/global warming is denying their own young friends and family a future. Now that is dangerous.
Reality is not a team sport. We need to work together to solve problems, not find people to blame and exclude and even hurt. Let's support the living as well as the unborn.
Meandering a mite from the topic, let's leave other people's religion and sex lives alone, rather than using power and institutions to gain power and control. A true reading of any spiritual text might make one think hard about caring for each other and the less fortunate, rather than phony for-profit invocations, which all too often show the talents of acting and hypocrisy.
6
I’m a lifeguard and adverse weather hurts me financially. Can I please get a million dollar bailout?
9
@Oliver How much do you have invested in your your bank loans, mortgage(s), equipment, etc., that you depend on for the success of your business?
3
A population of a few million human hunter-gatherers was apparently beyond the carrying capacity of the planet as most places where we showed up the megafauna disappeared.
Around 10-12,000 years ago, when large climate oscillations settled down, we developed agriculture which allowed us to double our population many times into the billions.
But agriculture faces big challenges if we don’t change our ways soon (1), as do our fisheries, and if they both decline significantly, forcing us back to being largely hunter-gatherers, history tells us that out of every 1,000 people you see maybe one survives.
Except this time it won’t be meat on the hoof with mastodons, large flightless birds and picking lobsters off New England beaches. Going back to trying to hunt and gather during the 6th mass extinction isn’t the best timing so one in a thousand may be wildly optimistic.
1 IPCC Western N America drought 1900-2100
http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2013/drought-western-us-1900-2100.png
4
@Erik Frederiksen
The megafauna extinctions that occurred were more likely the result of an impact event 12-13,000 years ago than human hunting. It is not easy to bring down one Mammoth much less drive the species to extinction. That same event more than likely killed off most of the Clovis Culture humans in the Americas as well.
2
@cynicalskeptic
Thanks. My post was a paraphrase of something said by the world’s foremost expert on the relationship of ice and climate, Richard Alley.
I’d be very surprised if he got that wrong.
3
@cynicalskeptic Here's an article about that.
"Throughout our entire history, humans and other hominins have selectively killed off the largest mammals."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/in-a-few-centuries-cows-could-be-the-largest-land-animals-left/558323/
3
Not at all worried about the farmers, these new welfare queens always get paid by the government.
8
@MB
Just think. donald had the entire Ukraine wrapped around his finger, almost, for just the measly sum of 400 million$.
26 billion in only 2 cash "flyovers" for 1 year? Those votes are going to get really expensive, really fast.
1
19 million acres may sound like a lot, but we have failures on this scale almost every year, for one reason or another.
We have over 2.4 BILLION acres in the U.S., with about 350 million acres under cultivation. This is not a catastrophe.
You can't make generalized conclusions based on one year, or one location.
We have always had wildly variable weather from year to year, even along the coasts where weather is more stable.
In NE Montana we had drought in 2017.
2018 was a perfect year with beautiful crops and timely rains.
In 2019 we had twice as much rain as normal which generated huge yields, but made it almost impossible to get crops harvested, because of the wet crops and wet fields.
My family has been in this part of the country since 1906, and the history of our weather is a roller coaster...nothing stable or "normal" about it.
6
@Raz Nice to hear from someone who lives there. I think it's fair to say that city folk (such as myself) mostly have very little understanding of farming and ranching, which does not stop us from being opinionated about it in forums like this.
1
Why not grow plants that are adapted to the changing weather conditions. State universities should fund programs to explore climate change resistant crops. Besides, the corn and soybeans grown in states affected are just used to fatten up livestock before slaughter, a very wasteful and methane producing process.
3
@Milque Toast - I am not aware of any crops that do well in floods one year and drought the next which is not uncommon in the midwest. My grandparents were corn/soybean farmers.
U.S. soybeans are a prime source for Japanese tofu which is the mainstay of a vegan diet.
http://www.tofu-as.com/english/tofu/qa.html#q01
5
@Milque Toast
If you really want to change farming, change the Farm Bill.
3
@Milque Toast
World wide you have seen the opposite as local crops well suited to an area developed after centuries of cultivation are replaced by GMO varieties needing fertilizer and pesticides.
2
Look through the years and you will quickly discover that many of these lands (esp. the Dakotas) are plagued by weather events - every year or two there is a flood or a drought. This is a decades long occurrence.
It's time for these lands to be returned to their original states - wetlands, prairie etc and the remaining lands to move to more sustainable forms of agriculture that include varied and rotated crops, and crops grown for human consumption and not animal feed.
11
@BMD
The weather may be wild up there but I know for a fact they grow as good and as varied a line of crops as any state from N. Dakota to Texas.
The "Buffalo Commons" concept while interesting is completely non workable beyond the cover of a book.
If you want to change farming and change the entire Midwest then the answer lies in the complete re write of the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill was a key factor in driving the youth out of the farm belt and it can be a key factor in bringing them back.
All other efforts will be futile.
1
A look through the comments is depressing evidence that there are people still unwilling to admit that smoking causes cancer... or the 2019 equivalent.
There is no fact so large and obvious that humans are not capable of ignoring it if it fits their narrative to do so. Sad.
20
These farmers will happily accept their welfare checks from the feds while decrying “welfare queens”.
For farmers a destroyed or unplanted crop is probably the best outcome, there’s no one to sell their crops to because of their choice of politicians.
18
@Paulie Yup, Lots of these knuckleheads will still vote for Trump.
2
@Paulie.....Do you have any idea how much it costs to plant a crop? Do you have any idea what portion of the loss is covered by government subsidies? How much have corn and soybean prices been depressed because of Trump's China tariffs? What per cent of farmers did not vote for Trump? The reason people from fly-over country have trouble with people form the coasts is often because they often make comments about farming absent any factual basis.
5
@Paulie
Or just take "prevented planting" and spend the winter watching Judge Judy.
Good thing people don't eat corn grown in the Midwest. That corn is for pig feed and bourbon. People corn is grown in the West. Even still, rice is good for pigs and it grows in swamps. Why not plant that?
1
@Stephen - Because the growing season is not long enough for rice in the midwest. My grandparents had a corn/soybean farm (Sweet White Gentleman corn is for people) and there were no swamps. Maybe a flood one year with a drought the next. And the flood does not last for 4-5 months for the rice to grow.
4
@Stephen
Rice does not grow in swamps.
3
@Stephen - sweet corn is grown in pretty much every state in the nation, and is part of the country's "produce" farming, not the kind of large-scale grain production done with feed corn, soybeans, wheat.
While this article is about too much water, there's going to be a reckoning out west where agriculture sucks up huge amounts of water in a water-scarce region, which still has an expanding population.
Interesting new book if you are interested in Western water issues is "Downriver" by Heather Hansman.
These farmers got their subsidies from a Democratic congress during the great depression,now they look down on Democrats and call them Socialists, while taking the taxpayers money. They call it government money to avoid having to admit if it was not for Democrats, those farms would now be owned by Wall Street.
41
@David Underwood
Excuse me, it is insurance. They pay premiums, like you do for your insurance. Covered claims include crop loss due to these kinds of conditions.
1
@William Romp That insurance is federally subsidized. It adds up to $20B per year. So I'm with the farmers- get government out of their lives and let the free market decide, regardless of weather.
3
@Pat S
Assuring the population of America has food means the government will never be out of the Ag. business.
Change farming? Change the Farm Bill. That's the answer.
2
Are you farmers going to listen to the scientists, elitists and liberals yet or is just the weather and we should let you fail appropriately like a capitalist?
16
The ideas most readily available in many rural and farming area are Rush Limbaugh's and other radio rightwingers.
When things happen to people they look for ideas that explain what is going on. Limbaugh and his cohorts provide an explanation, a poisonous one.
During the last Gilded Age it was farmers, in alliance with workers, who led progressive change. They worked to limit the power of railroads and other monopolies. They fought for a Postal Saving Bank to ensure the safety of their lifelong saving, etc. The ideas available to them in their communities were voiced by progressive political leaders like William Jennings Bryan and Robert LaFollette. Their organizations, The Grange and Farmers Union, educated them and empowered them to take on the Robber Barons.
Americans disrespect farmers. Their rural "market" is too small to attract a varied media, so Clear Channel,etc., dominates. I recall , a decent person with excellent progressive bona fides describe a successful community leader as "really smart even though she was such a farmer". Unions, faith groups, Democrats and other groups do not educate their members as they used to. People will latch on to the ideas available to them, and in many rural areas the idea stream has grown narrower and meaner.
13
That's okay, they voted for Trump and he doesn't believe in climate change nor global warming. When they want some change, maybe they'll educate themselves before they go out and vote next time. Sorry, I'm just tired of watching us all suffer because half of America doesn't want to recognize the problems, the very expensive problems, created via climate change.
40
Let's wait to see, IF, and how much this wetness may lead to higher food prices. My bet: not much. The affected areas are primarily used to grow corn and soybeans .... and, we have those in abundance, in excess and from various sources.
1
@PlayOn
Your response is about food prices? The article was about the challenges facing farmers, and their increased bankrupcies, suicides, and losses. Get a grip.
2
Can anyone tell me why there is not a pipeline system to move water around the country? We have a whole system of moving oil from the farthest reaches of Alaska to the most southern of states. But when there is a hurricane coming for New Orleans, and is forcasted for days, there is not way to move any water out of Lake Pontchartrain in preparation for a deluge.
Much of the water that the western states use comes from Lake Mead in Nevada. This lake is at its lowest point in history and could be refilled if there was such a system in place.
The areas that flood on a yearly basis are well-known and the excess water could be routed to the drier areas of the country (especially the ones that routinely catch on fire).
6
@Carl - water is very heavy, and there is an awful lot of it. Would you care to pay for the material, construction effort and energy consumption needed to move billions of tons of water thousands of miles, mostly uphill, including over little obstacles like the Rockies?
"Refilling" the reservoirs in desert states along the Colorado, with water pumped in sufficient quantities from elsewhere, would be astronomically more expensive than buying every desert-state resident a new home elsewhere.
12
@Carl - something more practical would be to cover parts of Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and other reservoirs out there, to reduce evaporation. Floating solar would keep more water in the lake, and would be able to add more power to the grid - especially since the hydro plants are already connected.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/floating-solar-is-more-than-panels-on-a-platform-its-hydroelectrics-symbiont/
11
@Carl - You are thinking like an Inca. I like it.
It might be helpful to add some perspective to corn and soybean farming in the U.S. In 2016 about 25% of the U.S. soybean crop was exported to China to support their addiction to cheap pork. And about 40% of the U.S. corn crop goes to ethanol production, even though there is a net loss of 54,000 BTU for each gallon produced. It seems there is considerable room for adjusting these end points before our population starts going hungry.
14
@Lauren
I don’t believe that is true anymore. There is a net gain.
@Lauren
The article was not about our population going hungry. It was about the challenges farmers face, which are driving increasing bankruptcy, suicides, and losses. I fail to understand how your added perspective pertains to the article.
@William Romp Nevertheless, the article focuses on soybean and corn farmers. There are other ways to make a living farming. I've talked to several ex-dairy farmers in up-state NY. They farm fish now and said it was the best choice they ever made. And don't think that farmers are the only ones who may be forced to adapt. Auto industry workers, coal miners and other also have to learn to adapt. Of course it was not about going hungry, but I've seen some bumper stickers that proclaim this sort of sentiment.
2
The issues in the article are clearly and thoughtfully presented. The elephant in the room is the mismanagement of the rivers that are also breaching their dikes and other controls. The current approach to containment is not sustainable. More focus on flood plain management as opposed to river containment is required.
18
33 billion of 88 billion in farm income is coming from federal subsidies this year.
So why do so many conservative farmers, look down their noses at the federal government and at other folks who need government help to make it? Kind of biting the hand that feeds you and setting different standards for yourself than for others.
98
The they deserve it comments are very discouraging.
According to this morning's testimony, you are being a Russian tool when you add to division, distrust and disdain. Just stop.
The nation's top soil, after air and water is the source of our country's wealth and peace. The families that work those lands are us. Their success is our success and their trials are our trials.
If you feel compelled to make a childish response, just stop. The time to move into a post-Trump country is now.
30
@GAYLE
Thank you. We have more in common than not, and live in a time of relative plenty compared with what is soon to come.
The sad thing is this was avoidable.
5
@GAYLE
I agree, Gayle.
Seems that many commenters assume "rural" and "farmer" equals "conservative" and "Trump voter."
It is our soil, our food, our agricultural policy--and we rely on all three for our continued existence.
It is time to get over our individual self-absorption and get with the program of repairing this tattered republic. It is falling apart at the seams.
7
@William Romp Look at a map of 2016 voting results by state. And I have MANY farmer relatives in the Midwest - I KNOW they voted for Trump and they have often boasted of taking their federally subsidized crop insurance when a sunflower crop gets destroyed by hail. Let them vote for science and progressive values in 2020 and we can talk. But they have built a high ideological wall for themselves.
10
The effects literally flow downstream as well, with the inundation of fresh water into the Mississippi delta adversely affecting shellfish production. The Times reported just last week that Louisiana is facing a $100 million hit to its oyster industry, with one Louisiana oysterman reporting this summer that 100% of the oysters he dug up were dead.
23
They voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The winning just does not stop. Getting bored already?
43
@Lycurgus
Thank goodness for wise souls like Luycurgus, who knows how and why individual farmers voted, and always votes correctly, so as to preserve the moral high ground, from which to dispense justice.
1
@William Romp
And has the wisdom along with the for sight to understand that 2% of the population deserves the brunt of the blame for donald over the Jill Stein voters or the I'm mad and not voting, voters, or the I got missed in the circular firing squad voter so I'm going to figure out a different way to put donald back in power and totally destroy my entire future.
Has the country lost it's collective mind over the idea we can't collectively get rid of and replace an obvious mistake?
Grow up people and start acting like adults. It's beginning to appear as though it may be our very last chance.
A couple comments here say they don't feel badly for farmers cause they are Trump supporters. Ok ... but think about the fact that taxpayers consistently have to bail them out. And so far under this admin it's 30 billion more than usual because of the totally unnecessary trade war with China. That is on top of the subsidies, plus money for flood relief and natural disasters.
15
@Doctor Woo
Subsidies, perhaps, cost taxpayers. The "bail outs" you and other commenters mention are actually insurance payouts. Farmers pay insurance premiums into a federal program. Their policies cover these kinds of conditions. The government makes a profit on the policies. The farmers collect payments just like you do when your insurance covers a loss. Read the article.
@William Romp ** and what if they don't have insurance or it lacks certain coverage. I read the article. The point I was trying to make is no matter who they vote for we all share the burden. Plus this President has caused even more pain. ...The article mentions nothing about government insurance or making a profit. Maybe you should read it
1
The higher the atmospheric level of CO2 and other greenhouse gases the higher the average temperature of the air. The higher the air temperature the more water vapor it can hold. This is basic physics. To bad most farmers are republicans, they are paying for GOP inaction now. Future generations are going to pay an incredible price for today's American political ignorance.
24
Time to turn all these wheat fields into rice paddies?
It would seem to make sense. The only downside would be that rice is highly absorbant. It would do an excellent job of absorbing all the glyphosate farmers here in the United States of Monsanto have put into the soil.
4
Most of us don't "roll with the punches" with the help of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in subsidies
71
@momalle3
You must not know any farmers. Every one I know has a job that enables them to do what they love more: farm. They are lucky to break even any year, and rarely turn a profit more than one in three.
I raised cows for a decade, and it was a losing proposition. Beef prices are so low that the very best farmers have to lose money on every animal.
You will appreciate farmers and the difficulty they are having with a changing climate when you go hungry, or are forced to eat a burger made out of crickets and cockroaches.
4
@momalle3 Farming is not optional for civilization; we'll die without it. Unlike factories which can come or go, we need farmers to grow food every year — even if nature is not cooperative. If we wish to survive, we'll subsidize farming. We absolutely must be able to try again next year, even if we've had a year that bankrupts us.
And yet, could we be making better farming decisions, such as not growing subsidized crops like corn to prop up bad ideas like bio-fuels and too-cheap meats? Absolutely.
4
Return the land to prairie and plant windmills for income! Save the land and save the planet.
13
@PMcD
You should come out sometime. Simple economics are taking over for all the rhetoric. I can drive from the Ks. border to OKC on hw 81 and never lose sight of a windmill. I'm thinking that's in the last 10 years or so.
"Accumulation" farms are springing up for windmill parts all across the midwest. 320 acre farms filled with windmill parts waiting to be shipped.
Wind is happening. Solar should be happening on an individual basis nation wide. The numbers work, right now.
One bad season is called "weather", not climate change.
3
@ricardoRI really, you still think this is just weather? Really?
5
@Paulie
You're both partially correct. The picture shown for the story is probably no more than a 4" or 5" rain at exactly the wrong time. The 19 million acre part at one short period of time is where things are starting to get strange. How best to describe it? Maybe, taking our picture at 6:00 AM after a "tough" night out on the town. It happens.
If you want to be truly effective for positive change you should work for massive changes in the Farm Bill.
It's the Farm Bill that got us in this mess and it's the Farm Bill that can get us out of it.
Why should they care, they get welfare when they can’t work.
12
@Greg
What is Greg insecure about?
His soybean crop didn't fare badly? Good, then get 'em boxed up and on a freighter to China. No, wait...
4
@DSL
You have no idea how spot on you are.
Piled and rotting everywhere.
The new "welfare queens" of the 21st century with almost 40% of this year's income courtesy of the much despised Federal Government (taxpayers' dollars) and thanks, in large part, to Donald Trump and the changing climate which is "fake news".
2019 is a harbinger of the years to come and may very likely become the "new normal".
52
But if you truly believe your livelihood is threatened by global climactic changes, would you still blithely vote for the clowns who deny climate change is real?
19
@Mary Crain
It's not just farmers and when you get this figured out please get back to, actually, most of us.
And if you say propaganda, I'd agree.
2
Fear not! President Trump will lead us out of all dilemmas!
4
It’s too dry, climate change.
It’s too wet, climate change.
It’s too cold, climate change.
It’s too hot, climate change.
I’m all for clean air and water and “green” energy, But you guys are funny.
1
@John Frank Yes, John - when moisture leaves one place it goes somewhere else. Climate scientists are aware. It's environmental science, not magic.
6
Throughout history no group of people have had to work harder than the American farmer, you fight the earth every day to eek out a living.
Currently you have been given two more challenges to manage on top of everything else you are doing.
1. A trade war with your largest consumer
2. Climate Change, as alluded to in this article
Both problems have one confluence. YOUR president.
He began a trade war by first destroying our single best advantage the Trans Pacific Partnership. If we were conducting this trade war with Canada, Mexico, Chili, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Japan the results might be very different
So you are on the forefront of climate change and our president knows more than our climate scientist, because he as a very good brain and an uncle who was a scientist. He calls this a hoax. Really? Is it a hoax?
This is the clown you voted for. If these policies are working for you vote for him again and your own extinction
37
@David Meli Very well said!
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@David Meli
Aaahh--good points, except for the opening remark. Migrant farm workers work many times harder than farmers--that is, people who own or operate agricultural businesses. And migrant farm workers lead a cushy life of luxury compared to even recent historical examples--American slaves, European serfs--AND compared to many modern-day third-world miners, trash-pickers, nomadic herdsmen, and factory workers.
It is interesting how many of these comments turn into (or start out as) indictments of Trump.
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Rightly so. He is well on his way, isn’t he, to destroying the country and the planet.
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Oh yeah, but let’s reflexively vote for Trump.
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19 million acres may sound like a lot, but we have failures on this scale almost every year, for one reason or another.
We have over 2.4 BILLION acres in the U.S., with about 350 million acres under cultivation. This is not a catastrophe.
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@Raz It is for a lot of farmers.
You can't make generalized conclusions based on one year, or one location.
We have always had wildly variable weather from year to year, even along the coasts where weather is more stable.
In NE Montana we had drought in 2017.
2018 was a perfect year with beautiful crops and timely rains.
In 2019 we had twice as much rain as normal which generated huge yields, but made it almost impossible to get crops harvested, because of the wet crops and wet fields.
My family has been in this part of the country since 1906, and the history of our weather is a roller coaster...nothing stable or "normal" about it.
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One would think that farmers, who as a group depend more on weather conditions and who are also educated in the sciences related to farming, would not vote for nor support climate change deniers. The science is there just as the science is there from their local ag extension office; they trust, live by, that local science from year to year. But when the science says climate change needs to be planned for, those same farmers will vote for anti-science bozos. I've lived in Iowa and Kansas all my life, and I've never understood why farmers will continue to vote against their own best interests. Alas, the science also suggests that such rain and heat will soon become the new normal. Imagine if you will what the 88 billion bucks could have provided if it had been spent on researching and preparing for that new normal. If you thought Gore's inconvenient truth was inconvenient back then, how inconvenient is it now? If any farmer voted for any GOP candidate since Gore ran, they are partially responsible for their own fates--another inconvenient truth.
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Climate change is having far reaching consequences for agriculture. In many parts of the world agriculture has collapsed creating increased migration pressure. In Central America increasing numbers of subsistence farmers have had their food source fail causing them to look elsewhere for food and a future (meanwhile cutting trees, unsustainably, to sell as firewood).
As the collapse of agriculture around the world becomes more widespread, migration pressure will increase worldwide. Resistance and conflict are the natural results, on an unprecedented scale. If, even with perfect distribution, we can only produce enough nutrition for a couple billion people, global conflict will dominate human affairs. No nation with nuclear weapons will accept losing.
Of course, humans can foresee the collapse of agriculture, and the likely consequences, so they will not wait for the inevitable, rather they will plan and act first in order to survive. The writing is already on the wall, migration pressure is mounting. We don’t have until we reach 2°C increase, we need to act as if it’s already the last minute, because it is.
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@Testit In the southwest the Old Ones built cities in the cliffs after years of drought. We may need walls INSIDE the US to keep out migrants from unbearable places (e.g. the South)
"The intense downpours are characteristic of climate change..."
"Statements of fact" like this one are unfortunate. While we're now (mostly) beyond the time in which climate-change deniers could seem credible, it doesn't follow that climate science now knows what the specific characteristics of climate change are now, and will be going forward. Yes, there are advanced theoretical models, but these models say much more about what could happen than what will happen. Indeed, for some of us that uncertainty is the scariest part.
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@RR It's not rocket science. A warmer Earth means more water evaporates from the oceans. More water in the atmosphere means more water coming down, either as rain or as snow.
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@RR - all prior times when the climate was warmer left specific signs in the geological record. Higher levels of flood-related sediment is one of those clear signs observed in past history. These days, that sediment is farmland washing away, and bringing nutrient loads that are causing increased dead zones like those in the Gulf of Mexico and in Lake Erie.
Simple gas laws, physics, not models, make it clear that warmer air can hold more water vapor. The same laws make it clear that at earthlike conditions, water vapor can only stay airborne for days or a couple weeks at most, and intense precipitation is observed in line with warmer/wetter conditions.
The changes that are coming are statements of fact based on observation, physics and past evidence. The certainty is the future holds a different precipitation regime than what prevailed during the 10,000 years or so that marked the development of agriculture.
Uncertainty is a given, but the future means farming will be, no average, more difficult as precipitation patterns keep shifting as we emit greenhouse gases and the climate system reacts to that.
So we need smarter people working on better policy to help those who produce our food deal with the impacts.
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And yet, with all the flooded fields and millions of acres not planted, I never noticed a shortage of any sort of produce in the grocery store aisles. Makes me wonder if there is way too much land being used for crops and perhaps too many farmers being kept afloat by gov't agricultural subsidies.
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@DonS
We now have worldwide production, which is good for everyone, in all countries.
If the U.S. has a bad year, Brazil and Australia can pick up the slack.
It makes both supply and prices more stable.
Your view is very short-sighted and egocentric.
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@DonS
We now have worldwide production, which is good for everyone, in all countries.
If the U.S. has a bad year, Brazil and Australia can pick up the slack. It makes both supply and prices more stable.
Your view is very short-sighted and egocentric.
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@DonS A large percentage of the crops spoken of in this article are either sold overseas or used for animal feed. And as others have pointed out, we get produce from other countries routinely.
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Who would have been eating these crops (corn and soybean) if they had been planted and harvested successfully? Would they have been for human consumption at the local, national or international level, or for the livestock industry? Were these small family farms or the larger corporate farms?
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Farmers worldwide are incredibly vulnerable to climate change, as demonstrated by recent weather patterns.
The lost opportunity in industrialized farm country is in carbon capture and topsoil regeneration.
Fossil fuel based agriculture, using petrochemical derived fertilizers, degrades topsoil and releases carbon into the atmosphere. Something like one third of all atmospheric carbon was once captured in topsoil.
Carbon capture would be a far better application of Federal subsidies than the current ones, which incentivize all of the wrong activities from a climate perspective.
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This is why we need to stop the farm bailouts. They need to deal with the consequences of their actions. Without pain farmers will continue to support Trumps anti-environmental policies because there is no real cost. Treat farms like real businesses and not welfare dependent institutions.
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@Matt J. Neal, who farms five miles south of me, lost 80 acres to an expanding seepage lake. Cattails have started growing in one spot. The pain of creativity might get Neil harvesting those cattail tubers. Would you eat them instead of any corn based food product you are accustomed to? Howard showed me where the tiles he dug into a 200 acre parcel are acting like wicks this year, drawing groundwater into his saturated fields.
Howard and Neal are savvy businessmen. Neither support anti-environmental policies though one voted for Trump. They lost about $230,000 gross revenue in just these two fields. When does that become a real cost? And does it matter that three families live in Neal's house with four jobs in addition to the farming to support them?
Your tired tropes miss the point of this piece.
Our current food system is in trouble. We need creative ideas, support for local ag, an appetite for non-processed foods and busloads of new farmers working smaller fields with different land ownership structures coupled with decreased support for corporate ag, locally grown and saved seeds instead of pharma-seeds, and measures of success that count health outcomes, vibrant rural communities and platefuls of food specific to every bio-region.
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@Ashley Nedeau-Owen The reality is that farmers who grow vegetables and food we actually eat don't get bailouts. Most corn is used as a feedstock and therefore not consumed directly by humans. The bailouts go to corn, soy and wheat farmers. The feds should be subsidizing the farmers that actually produce the whole food that is good for us and not processed food (which is derived from corn / wheat / soy). Subsidized broccoli? There is a case for that, but lets stop pretending that most of the crops that these commodity farmers produce is used as real food.
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My experience talking to farmers and to many Trump supporters is that they do agree that the climate is changing-- they simply will not agree that the causes are man-made. However, I have found that if I focus only on America's ability to address climate change due to our superior power, resources and technology-- after all America IS great again) I often get significant agreement that climate issues can be solved by man.
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Scary. What happens at 3-4C which we will almost certainly be seeing in the coming decades. This is just the beginning. The saddest part is that I had hope that we might start turning this around when the concrete effects began to be felt. Unfortunately, many of those directly experiencing the results are still denying the reality. Venice just voted against climate remediations in the middle of the worst flood of their city in 50 years. If we cannot learn from the evidence right in front of our faces, humanity is in a very great deal of trouble.
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Our local co-op is already showing more imported (CA & Mexico) produce than we usually have this time of the year. We had a "white" Halloween followed by winter weather. The pickings were scarce in the last weeks of our Farmers' Market which ends in the first week of November. Way too early in our Fall, we saw that there were shortages or undersized produce. And now, after the curtain has fallen on the growing season with the early winter act, we are turning back to milder temperatures. How can anyone say this is normal?
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However these people still overwhelmingly vote for politicians that deny climate change is happening. It's a bit difficult to feel too sorry for them.
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@dairyfarmersdaughter And to vote for politicians that allow their supposed bail out to be corrupt:
https://newfoodeconomy.org/trump-tariff-payment-million-dollar-farm-bailout/
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Being that the farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump and thus get to reap the rewards of his trade war, I"ll try not to shed any tears into my morning coffee.
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Hope the farmers don't vote for Trump. Between he climate denying and his trade war, he's got the farmers in a terrible spot.
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Sadly so many of the farmers I've met have been strong climate change deniers. Despite these clear changes in weather conditioners, they will never vote to do anything about it.
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@Willow You reap what you sow.
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@Willow, I wrote the story, and if you read it, the farmers I spoke with were very clear that they attributed an enormous part of the transformation of weather patterns they have seen in their lifetimes to climate change. Sure, there are many people who still do not accept the overwhelming evidence for climate change, but this story shows that the attitude is far from universal.
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@John Schwartz thank you for this comment and this story. It's disheartening to so often read comments like those from @willow and others here. It's true that Trump sees more support from rural areas. Farmers live in rural areas but not every person who lives in a rural area is a farmer. In fact, the square mile where I live has 12 families. Only TWO of those families make their living as farmers. The other 10 include a builder, a nurse, factory workers, an insurance man, a pharmacist and two guys who live on disability checks. (We have wonderful summer picnics together so I know them) How do we know THEY are not the ones voting for Trump? My husband (a farmer) and myself (a teacher) did NOT vote for Trump. People blame "farmers" for Trump but that's only because farmers are the only identifiable scapegoats in the rural countryside. Believe you me, real life farmers are the minority in any township. I can make a strong guess which of my rural neighbors voted for Trump and it's not the two farmers.
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