8 ms·

The U.S. Wheat Crop Is in Trouble

vegetablepotpie 5y ago
Sharing a quote near the end of the article, which I feel was very striking. > Ortiz-Bobea coauthored a study … found that climate change has already made global farming productivity 21% lower than it could have been—the equivalent of making no improvements in productivity for seven years.
fillskills 5y ago
From speaking with several farmers in different regions of the US - having unplanned weather extremes has caused loss of many crops and the loss is growing every year. If there wasnt so much development effort spent on making gmo seeds that can withstand more extreme climate conditions we would be at a much worse place. We would literally be without some major crops. Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change
- saurik 5y ago
  > Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change While having anyone affected is sad, if we are going to qualify the sadness, isn't this the least sad outcome? I would be much more sad if the farmers in regions that cared the most about fighting against climate change were the ones first affected.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I think the "sadly" there is supposed to be the other way around. That is supposed to be "sadly, the farmers affected believe the least in fighting climate change."
  - vegetablepotpie 5y ago
    I’m sorry, what? I feel like that’s a normal human thing to say. People usually say it’s sad when people are affected by bad things, and don’t put a great deal of thought into every implication of how they phrase things. I don’t know, maybe you’re more a fan of karmic justice than of sad irony.
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      Climate change increasingly affecting people denying climate change makes it more likely they will one day accept it. I don't know how true that is, but that's my view on this particular line of thought.
      - loopz 5y ago
        Karma is believed to work across lifetimes. Without it we'd not be free to make mistakes. So is more about reincarnation, and not about revenge, justice systems or retribution. Misguided belief in karma may wither away at sense of necessary fairness (dharma), which is also karma.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Except that affects everyone who depends on wheat.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  >Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change Hopefully it will cause them to reconsider their position on climate change.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    I can't imagine why it would. "Droughts have always happened, and this is just bad luck. Climate always changes. Climate change is a hoax designed to put family farms out of business and make us get all of our food from China." If they've made it this far denying science, I don't see any reason why this would change anything. It's not as if a shift in climate change stance would reduce droughts this year or his decade.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I don't think GMO crops can survive droughts: they still need water.
  - doikor 5y ago
    There are drought resistant crop varieties (both GMO and non GMO kind). Problem is that the drought resistant ones usually have lower yield and farmers in general prefer prefer higher yield kind. The GMO ones usually manage to keep the yield high while achieving good drought resistance. But yes when the drought is severe enough it will kill any crop no matter what species or variety. Though usually drought does not result in total crop loss but lower yield. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/march/drought-tolerant-corn-in-the-united-states-research-commercialization-and-related-crop-production-practices/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/march/drought-tole... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651533/
- asdff 5y ago
  Politics luckily go out the window when it means yields. Many crops in the US today are planted with genetically modified seeds. For crops like corn, soy, cotton, and others, over 90% of the acreage in the US is genetically modified. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/charts-of-note/?topicId=a2d1ab41-13b3-48b5-8451-688d73507ff4 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/charts...
animal_spirits 5y ago
The linked slideshow of satellite images between last year and this year is slightly alarming [0] [0] https://gizmodo.com/7-shocking-satellite-images-reveal-the-wests-megadrough-1847080510 https://gizmodo.com/7-shocking-satellite-images-reveal-the-w...
animal_spirits 5y ago
> The varieties of wheat hit hard by the drought and the heat in those states are what are known as soft white, and it’s the only place in the U.S. that grows this kind of wheat. Soft white wheat is good for pastries and the like because of its low protein content, which makes it less stretchy than traditional flour. But wheat kernels in the Pacific Northwest are shriveling due to the heat and the drought, upping their protein content—and meaning that a lot of the crop that will be harvested won’t be suitable for the soft wheat market. Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested
- NaOH 5y ago
  >Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested The opposite is more likely. Pastry/cake flour has low protein content. That's a big contributor to the delicate items made with it. More protein content than that is what Americans call all-purpose flour. Of course it's better for less delicate items, like muffins, where a balance of tenderness and stability are beneficial. More protein than that is bread flour (though it's not produced from soft wheat like pastry flour), and higher still is high-gluten flour. Ultimately, then, if there's less soft white wheat flour available, we're not apt to get new products from the harvested wheat. We may, though, get new products from alternative baking approaches people determine to replace the pastry flour if there's ample shortage and/or excessively high cost for that flour.
adrianN 5y ago
The scary thing is that even if we stopped carbon emissions today, the world would keep getting hotter for many years, even if don't trigger any more of the climate tipping points.
- asdff 5y ago
  Time to plant trees
  - adrianN 5y ago
    While being careful not to change the albedo too much, or you make things worse.
- refurb 5y ago
  Yup. There is pretty much nothing we can do to stop a global catastrophe at this point.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    The choice now is between small global catastrophe or large global catastrophe.
lumost 5y ago
Watching the Pacific Northwest heatwave I can’t help but think that regional climate is going to change much faster than what laymen like myself would expect. 120 degree dry air temperatures produce desert conditions. I can’t imagine that the temperate rainforest of the PNW would last a decade with that kind of weather.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Why would you think that when it was a heat dome produced by an anomalous high pressure system forcing winds downslope over mountainous ridges, increasing pressure and temperature in the process. Texas experienced a single digit week long blizzard this year, but I'm not expecting it to turn into Colorado. Wheat yields are doing fine, despite the alarmism, and you can see for yourself (scroll to wheat and view the PNG graphs by year): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/index.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/index....
  - vegetablepotpie 5y ago
    > Wheat yields are doing fine Your source to support that claim provides 1 year of historical data. The article of this discussion says that since the 1960s, total U.S. agricultural production has dropped by 1/5th due to climate change, negating 7 years of improved yields. Due to increased temperatures and decreased moisture, this will lead to greater diminishment of yields, and it’s possible that agricultural innovation will be unable to keep up.
  - qqqwerty 5y ago
    Texas had a blizzard because the polar vortex dropped down from the Arctic due to record warming[1] Climate change is going to make things weird. Not everyone is going to get warmer. Some models show Europe entering an Ice Age due to a slow down of the gulf stream. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-warming-arctic-helped-drive-a-deep-freeze-into-texas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-w...
    - 5y ago
onecommentman 5y ago
For ongoing monitoring various US crops over the growing season, https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/cj82k728n https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/cj82k7... Weekly weather and crop bulletin from the USDA. For continual improvement over time in US corn yield, see https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren... For continual improvement over time in US soybean yield, see https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/what-s-really-driving-high-soybean-yields-yeah-someone-did-study https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/what-s-really-driving-h... For current and forecasted global ag production, see http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca8861en http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca8861en OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2020-2029 https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/world-agricultural-production https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/world-agricultural-production Reading Gizmodo for ag is like reading AgWeb for the latest zero-day. It might be fine (the Gizmodo content on this year’s wheat crop mirrors the USDA reports cited above) but there are other sources for which it is their full time job. For global ag, you might want to start with USDA or FAO for a fuller picture before putting a lot of faith on a single study saying anything definitive about global ag, especially purporting 20% differences over the entirety of world agricultural production.
kaminar 5y ago
All this worrying will help, for sure. Let me know when the next ice age doom and gloom hits the newsroom.
Symbiote 5y ago
Can anyone find out how much grain the USA stockpiles? I tried to find out for the EU, but I can't find that either. (The stockpiles/overproduction was one of the favourite criticisms of anti-EU people in Britain.)
- Fjolsvith 5y ago
  Living in Western Kansas and working for a large family farm right now. Most of the farmers around here use the long tube grain storage (1) and store it right on the edge of their fields. Lots of grain stored here across the countryside that probably isn't recorded anywhere. 1. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/agricultural-plastic-polyethylene-grain-silage-silo_60686808697.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/agricultural-plastic-...

Sharing a quote near the end of the article, which I feel was very striking. > Ortiz-Bobea coauthored a study … found that climate change has already made global farming productivity 21% lower than it could have been—the equivalent of making no improvements in productivity for seven years.

fillskills 5y ago

From speaking with several farmers in different regions of the US - having unplanned weather extremes has caused loss of many crops and the loss is growing every year. If there wasnt so much development effort spent on making gmo seeds that can withstand more extreme climate conditions we would be at a much worse place. We would literally be without some major crops. Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change

saurik 5y ago
> Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change While having anyone affected is sad, if we are going to qualify the sadness, isn't this the least sad outcome? I would be much more sad if the farmers in regions that cared the most about fighting against climate change were the ones first affected.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I think the "sadly" there is supposed to be the other way around. That is supposed to be "sadly, the farmers affected believe the least in fighting climate change."
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  I’m sorry, what? I feel like that’s a normal human thing to say. People usually say it’s sad when people are affected by bad things, and don’t put a great deal of thought into every implication of how they phrase things. I don’t know, maybe you’re more a fan of karmic justice than of sad irony.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Climate change increasingly affecting people denying climate change makes it more likely they will one day accept it. I don't know how true that is, but that's my view on this particular line of thought.
    - loopz 5y ago
      Karma is believed to work across lifetimes. Without it we'd not be free to make mistakes. So is more about reincarnation, and not about revenge, justice systems or retribution. Misguided belief in karma may wither away at sense of necessary fairness (dharma), which is also karma.
- mc32 5y ago
  Except that affects everyone who depends on wheat.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
>Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change Hopefully it will cause them to reconsider their position on climate change.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I can't imagine why it would. "Droughts have always happened, and this is just bad luck. Climate always changes. Climate change is a hoax designed to put family farms out of business and make us get all of our food from China." If they've made it this far denying science, I don't see any reason why this would change anything. It's not as if a shift in climate change stance would reduce droughts this year or his decade.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I don't think GMO crops can survive droughts: they still need water.
- doikor 5y ago
  There are drought resistant crop varieties (both GMO and non GMO kind). Problem is that the drought resistant ones usually have lower yield and farmers in general prefer prefer higher yield kind. The GMO ones usually manage to keep the yield high while achieving good drought resistance. But yes when the drought is severe enough it will kill any crop no matter what species or variety. Though usually drought does not result in total crop loss but lower yield. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/march/drought-tolerant-corn-in-the-united-states-research-commercialization-and-related-crop-production-practices/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/march/drought-tole... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651533/
asdff 5y ago
Politics luckily go out the window when it means yields. Many crops in the US today are planted with genetically modified seeds. For crops like corn, soy, cotton, and others, over 90% of the acreage in the US is genetically modified. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/charts-of-note/?topicId=a2d1ab41-13b3-48b5-8451-688d73507ff4 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/charts...

animal_spirits 5y ago

The linked slideshow of satellite images between last year and this year is slightly alarming [0] [0] https://gizmodo.com/7-shocking-satellite-images-reveal-the-wests-megadrough-1847080510 https://gizmodo.com/7-shocking-satellite-images-reveal-the-w...

animal_spirits 5y ago

> The varieties of wheat hit hard by the drought and the heat in those states are what are known as soft white, and it’s the only place in the U.S. that grows this kind of wheat. Soft white wheat is good for pastries and the like because of its low protein content, which makes it less stretchy than traditional flour. But wheat kernels in the Pacific Northwest are shriveling due to the heat and the drought, upping their protein content—and meaning that a lot of the crop that will be harvested won’t be suitable for the soft wheat market. Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested

NaOH 5y ago
>Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested The opposite is more likely. Pastry/cake flour has low protein content. That's a big contributor to the delicate items made with it. More protein content than that is what Americans call all-purpose flour. Of course it's better for less delicate items, like muffins, where a balance of tenderness and stability are beneficial. More protein than that is bread flour (though it's not produced from soft wheat like pastry flour), and higher still is high-gluten flour. Ultimately, then, if there's less soft white wheat flour available, we're not apt to get new products from the harvested wheat. We may, though, get new products from alternative baking approaches people determine to replace the pastry flour if there's ample shortage and/or excessively high cost for that flour.

adrianN 5y ago

The scary thing is that even if we stopped carbon emissions today, the world would keep getting hotter for many years, even if don't trigger any more of the climate tipping points.

asdff 5y ago
Time to plant trees
- adrianN 5y ago
  While being careful not to change the albedo too much, or you make things worse.
refurb 5y ago
Yup. There is pretty much nothing we can do to stop a global catastrophe at this point.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  The choice now is between small global catastrophe or large global catastrophe.

lumost 5y ago

Watching the Pacific Northwest heatwave I can’t help but think that regional climate is going to change much faster than what laymen like myself would expect. 120 degree dry air temperatures produce desert conditions. I can’t imagine that the temperate rainforest of the PNW would last a decade with that kind of weather.

chrisco255 5y ago
Why would you think that when it was a heat dome produced by an anomalous high pressure system forcing winds downslope over mountainous ridges, increasing pressure and temperature in the process. Texas experienced a single digit week long blizzard this year, but I'm not expecting it to turn into Colorado. Wheat yields are doing fine, despite the alarmism, and you can see for yourself (scroll to wheat and view the PNG graphs by year): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/index.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/index....
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  > Wheat yields are doing fine Your source to support that claim provides 1 year of historical data. The article of this discussion says that since the 1960s, total U.S. agricultural production has dropped by 1/5th due to climate change, negating 7 years of improved yields. Due to increased temperatures and decreased moisture, this will lead to greater diminishment of yields, and it’s possible that agricultural innovation will be unable to keep up.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  Texas had a blizzard because the polar vortex dropped down from the Arctic due to record warming[1] Climate change is going to make things weird. Not everyone is going to get warmer. Some models show Europe entering an Ice Age due to a slow down of the gulf stream. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-warming-arctic-helped-drive-a-deep-freeze-into-texas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-w...
  - 5y ago

onecommentman 5y ago

For ongoing monitoring various US crops over the growing season, https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/cj82k728n https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/cj82k7... Weekly weather and crop bulletin from the USDA. For continual improvement over time in US corn yield, see https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren... For continual improvement over time in US soybean yield, see https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/what-s-really-driving-high-soybean-yields-yeah-someone-did-study https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/what-s-really-driving-h... For current and forecasted global ag production, see http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca8861en http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca8861en OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2020-2029 https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/world-agricultural-production https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/world-agricultural-production Reading Gizmodo for ag is like reading AgWeb for the latest zero-day. It might be fine (the Gizmodo content on this year’s wheat crop mirrors the USDA reports cited above) but there are other sources for which it is their full time job. For global ag, you might want to start with USDA or FAO for a fuller picture before putting a lot of faith on a single study saying anything definitive about global ag, especially purporting 20% differences over the entirety of world agricultural production.

kaminar 5y ago

All this worrying will help, for sure. Let me know when the next ice age doom and gloom hits the newsroom.

Symbiote 5y ago

Can anyone find out how much grain the USA stockpiles? I tried to find out for the EU, but I can't find that either. (The stockpiles/overproduction was one of the favourite criticisms of anti-EU people in Britain.)

Fjolsvith 5y ago
Living in Western Kansas and working for a large family farm right now. Most of the farmers around here use the long tube grain storage (1) and store it right on the edge of their fields. Lots of grain stored here across the countryside that probably isn't recorded anywhere. 1. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/agricultural-plastic-polyethylene-grain-silage-silo_60686808697.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/agricultural-plastic-...