Climate Change Impact on Agriculture
Here, we will explore how climate change affects agriculture. We’ll look at how rising temperatures, extreme weather, and changing climate zones impact crop yields and livestock productivity. We’ll also discuss how these changes present challenges to food security and require farmers to adapt their practices. This lesson will help us understand the critical relationship between climate and agriculture and the need for sustainable solutions.
Impact on Livestock
Temperature is a crucial element influencing livestock productivity. Both extreme heat and cold can stress animals, but rising temperatures due to climate change are of particular concern.
Increased Water Needs: Under high temperatures, livestock require 2-3 times more water to stay hydrated and maintain their body functions.
Feed Quality: High heat affects forage quality, making it less nutritious and reducing its availability. This can lead to decreased feed intake and poor nutrition for livestock. In naturally drier regions, a lack of water and increased temperatures can make forage extremely expensive and difficult to procure.
Habitat Loss: Climate change can decrease the quality of rangeland and even erase native rangeland from the land entirely. Losing viable land for livestock husbandry makes it more expensive for farmers to feed their animals, lowering production efficiency.
Heat Stress: Prolonged exposure to high temperatures can be fatal for ruminants. Heat stress can lead to heat exhaustion or heat stroke, resulting in high mortality rates.
- Heat Stress reduces production in dairy cows. When temperatures rise, cows eat less, their metabolism slows, and milk yields drops.
- In ruminants like cattle and sheep, high temperatures can decrease meat production. Heat stressed animals grow slower and have lower meat quality.
Disease Susceptibility: Higher temperatures can increase the susceptibility of livestock to diseases. The immune system of heat-stressed animals is often compromised, making them more vulnerable to infections.
Reproductive Rates: High temperatures negatively impact the reproductive performance of cows, pigs, and poultry. Both male and female fertility rates drop during heat waves.
Egg Laying: In poultry, egg production decreases significantly during high temperatures, affecting both the quantity and quality of eggs.
Impact on Cropland: Annuals and Perennials
In this section, we will delve into how climate change impacts cropland. We will explore the specific challenges that changing climate conditions pose to crop yields, productivity, and overall food security.
Crops have specific environmental conditions that they thrive in, including particular ranges of temperature, rainfall, and soil types. When these conditions change unexpectedly due to climate change, crop yield and productivity can significantly decrease.
Perennials versus Annuals
The main difference between a perennial and an annual crop is the production lifespan of that crop. While an annual crop completes its lifecycle in one growing season, perennials are long-lived and can provide consistent yields over multiple years.
For example, peach trees are perennials because they live for longer than two years and will produce peaches for several years without needing to be replanted. Corn, on the other hand, grows, matures, and dies within one year.
Annual Crop Impact
Between 1981 and 2010, climate change has led to a noticeable decrease in the global mean yields of key crops:
- Maize: 4.1% decrease
- Wheat: 1.8% decrease
- Soybeans: 4.5% decrease
While these decreases might seem small, it’s important to remember that these figures represent global averages. This means that the impact of climate change on crop yields can vary significantly by region. In some areas, farmers have experienced much more severe reductions in crop yields due to increasingly adverse growing conditions, such as prolonged droughts, extreme heat, and flooding.
Conversely, certain regions, particularly in higher latitudes, may have seen small increases in yields. For example, in northern latitudes higher average temperatures have extended the growing season significantly, allowing for longer periods of crop growth and potentially higher yields. However, factors like fewer rainfall events can mitigate the benefits of a longer growing season. This regional variability underscores the complexity of climate change impacts on agriculture.
However, the overall expected trend for the coming years and decades is concerning. As climate change continues to progress, we anticipate more frequent and severe extreme weather events. These events are likely to disrupt agricultural production cycles, further reducing crop yields globally. Additionally, the increased occurrence of pests and diseases due to changing climates can also negatively impact crop health and productivity. Pests that were previously unable to cause massive harm to commercial operations because of a colder climate may now be susceptible to large infection events, ruining crop productivity.
Perennial Crop Impact
Perennial systems can be simultaneously more resilient to climate change AND more susceptible to its impacts. Here’s how:
Extensive Root Systems: Perennial root systems are more robust and usually larger than those of annual systems. These deep and widespread roots help perennials access water and retain nutrients better than an annual system. These root systems also help prevent soil erosion and nutrient loss during extreme weather events, like flooding and extended drought.
Additionally, perennial crops usually require less maintenance compared to annual crops. Annuals must be replanted every year and treated intensively for pests and nutrients. Perennials may still need amendments, but don’t need to be replanted each year.
While the permanence of these systems can help lessen some effects climate change, it can also cause its own problems. A farmer that has an annual crop operation can switch crops/varieties to adapt to climate change much more easily than a perennial farmer can. Perennial crops are intended as a long-term investment for farmers. Replanting an entire vineyard or orchard with new varieties is an extremely costly and time consuming process by itself, even when not including the revenue lost while waiting for the new varieties to mature.
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Agriculture Adaptations
Now that you understand the problems facing the agricultural industry as a whole, let’s discuss ways farmers are fighting back.
Animal Agriculture
There are several options currently available to farmers impacted by adverse climate events.
- Infrastructure Changes: one easy way to improve productivity and health of livestock in extreme heat is by installing structures and technology that can cool down livestock habitation. Many of these technologies are all things that humans use to beat the heat, too. Fans, misters, and shade structures can lower temperatures in barns and pastures to manageable levels, and can be relatively inexpensive toinstall.
- Ensuring animals have easy access to water is crucial for maintaining hydration and regulating body temperature. This is easier said than done, especially on larger operations during periods of water scarcity. Natural bodies of water can become contaminated from livestock overuse and waste accumulation. Using techniques like rotational grazing and maintaining buffer zones around water bodies can reduce livestock impact.
- Breeding/utilizing resilient livestock: By breeding for traits that help livestock adapt to new climate conditions, agricultural productivity can be maintained and even increased.
- For example, cattle with the “slick gene” have shorter, sleeker coats and larger sweat glands, which helps them dissipate heat more effectively. This genetic trait allows these cattle to maintain productivity in higher temperatures, outperforming breeds without this adaption.
- Heat-resistant livestock tend to have better overall health in hot conditions, as they can handle the stress and related health issues that come with high temperatures much better.
- For example, cattle with the “slick gene” have shorter, sleeker coats and larger sweat glands, which helps them dissipate heat more effectively. This genetic trait allows these cattle to maintain productivity in higher temperatures, outperforming breeds without this adaption.
- Use management techniques that reduce outgoing emissions: This involves implementing practices that lower the greenhouse gases produced by livestock operations. While these methods and technology don’t necessarily solve immediate climate problems, implementing them is key for the future of agriculture.
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One example of technology that reduces emissions are anaerobic digesters. These are systems that manage manure and other organic waste by breaking them down in an oxygen-free environment. This process produces biogas (mainly methane), which can be captured and used as a renewable energy source. This prevents the GHGs from being released directly into the atmosphere, reducing emissions and saving energy.
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- Habitat conservation and restoration: by restoring native ecosystems and using techniques that allow livestock and the existing wildlife to co-exist, regenerative processes can be utilized to restore the natural resources that used to be present in the region.
- Many of the agricultural activities we engage in can degrade existing resources.
For example, intensive cattle operations can compact soil, eliminating any potential for the soil to refill aquifers and support plant life. If the cattle are managed effectively on the landscape, the soil will be healthy enough to sustain future commercial use and avoid strain on other natural resources as a result.
- Many of the agricultural activities we engage in can degrade existing resources.
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Technology Improvements: agricultural productivity can also be influenced by the animal’s happiness. Taking measures to ensure an animal is healthy and happy can increase productivity even when other options aren’t viable.
- Smart collars on cows can monitor cattle health in real-time, alerting ranchers when a cow is experiencing extreme stress. They can also be used to track who in the herd the cow is friends with, and ensure that they’re turned out in the same field. The improvement in agricultural data collection and use has allowed the rise of higher productivity even when the existing environment is becoming less tolerable.
Cropland Agriculture
By engaging in a more holistic perspective to farming, any farmer can adapt their operation to reduce the impact climate change has on their crops.
- No-Till farming: No-till farming is a method wherein the soil is left undisturbed from harvest to planting. Have you ever picked at a scab, and subsequently the wound took much longer to heal? While not a perfect analogy, no-till farming is like when you let the scrape scab over and you leave it alone. By giving the land time to “heal,” soil function is restored and improved. This also helps reduce greenhouse gas release from the soil; when soil is tilled (or plowed), it temporarily introduces oxygen to the topsoil and ‘wakes up’ the microbes within, who respirate greenhouse gases.
- By leaving the soil alone, soil erosion is reduced, making the soil less likely to be blown away by wind or washed away by rain. This helps keep all the good nutrients we want for our plants inside the soil instead of contaminating the land and waterways around it.
- Cover Cropping: Cover cropping involves growing a crop during the off-season when the main crops are not being cultivated. These crops are left unharvested. There are many benefits to this practice. Soil erosion is reduced because the plant root systems are physically holding the soil in place, providing protection against wind. Cover crops can also suppress weeds and reduce plant diseases. By merely taking up space, this leaves much less room for plants farmers don’t want to grow. Some special cover crops (legumes) can add nitrogen to the soil, which is a key nutrient for plant growth. As conventional nitrogen sources can be expensive and harmful to the environment, legumes are a great alternative.
- Crop Rotation: the practice of alternating different crops in the same field across different seasons or years. Changing crops each season helps prevent pests and diseases that prefer certain crops from establishing themselves in the soil. It also introduces a variety of organic materials into the soil, which allows for greater biodiversity.
- Agroforestry: the integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems. This special system benefits both the trees and the annual crops/animals, making the system more resilient as a whole. The trees cool down plants by providing shade for crops and animals, and the biodiversity present in the system makes it harder for disease to spread. The superior root systems of the trees can also help retain water and nutrients.
- There are a variety of agroforestry designs and systems, customizable for your environment and farming goals.
- There are a variety of agroforestry designs and systems, customizable for your environment and farming goals.
- Integrated Pest Management (IPM): the targeted and judicious application of pest control techniques. This management system seeks to reduce overuse of expensive and detrimental pest control techniques by adopting a prevention-based mindset. Farmers using this system implement cultural techniques, like cover cropping or crop rotation, to minimize chances of pest proliferation. If this doesn’t completely work, extremely precise application of pesticides is then prescribed. By monitoring for pests constantly and using natural preventatives, the use of synthetic product can be reduced significantly.
- Nutrient Management: The use of less-concentrated or well-timed application of fertilizers. By paying attention to the weather forecast when applying, farmer save money and the environment without losing the benefits of nutrient amendments.
- Conservation buffers: Vegetation strips placed in the landscape for an ecological purpose. This reduces runoff and improves air and water quality.
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What Now?
To improve the accuracy of climate change impact predictions, more data needs to be collected. New technologies are being developed to aid in predicting climate change, with AI playing an increasingly significant role in the agricultural world. Examples include Knowledge Guided Machine Learning (KGML), process-based models, and hybrid neural network models.
One such tool, COMET-Farm, is a national emissions calculator that uses a model called DayCent to predict emissions values based on various factors such as management techniques, region, soil data, crop/livestock type, and weather patterns. This tool can help farmers qualify for emissions reduction subsidies and raises awareness about how our food choices impact the environment.
Rotational grazing is a livestock management practice where animals are moved between different pasture areas (or paddocks) to allow for periods of grazing and recovery. This system helps improve pasture health, increases forage productivity, and reduces soil erosion.