Record-breaking heat and pockets of droughts are baking farmland across the country, threatening crop yields and squeezing out any remaining wiggle room to cope with more extreme weather this summer.
aren’t likely to feel the pinch, said Nick Paulson, a professor in the agricultural school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A combination of crop insurance and the mix of economic factors that determine commodity prices mean weather-related impacts to crop yields typically “don’t end up translating into as large fluctuations at the retail and consumer level,” he said.
Predictable seasonal norms are becoming rarer, as evolving weather patterns disrupt agriculture in ways that are likely to worsen over time, according to theClimate change, fueled by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, is expected to increase rainfall variability, raising the likelihood of crop failures from both drought and excessive precipitation.
Cotton plants, which typically thrive in high heat, on a farm in northwestern Texas, where temperatures have hit triple digits.“Is the climate changing? Yeah. I don’t think there’s much argument to that,” said Boening, who is also the president of the Texas Farm Bureau. “We see heat like this every year,” he said, but “normally it doesn’t come until the end of July to August.”
“At the moment, the world is all looking at Brazil very closely” to help fill the gap, Basse said, as the country has been producing record cereal crops and is. “It’s kind of become the important gorilla in the room if you’re looking at global grain production.”
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