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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Fri Jan 17, 2014, 07:53 AM Jan 2014

Extreme Weather Wreaking Havoc on Food as Farmers Suffer

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-17/extreme-weather-wreaking-havoc-on-food-as-farmers-suffer.html



Volatile weather around the world is taking farmers on a wild ride.

Too much rain in northern China damaged crops in May, three years after too little rain turned the world’s second-biggest corn producer into a net importer of the grain. Dry weather in the U.S. will cut beef output from the world’s biggest producer to the lowest level since 1994, following 2013’s bumper corn crop, which pushed America’s inventory up 30 percent. U.K. farmers couldn’t plant in muddy fields after the second-wettest year on record in 2012 dented the nation’s wheat production.

“Extreme weather events are a massive risk to agriculture,” said Peter Kendall, president of the U.K. National Farmers Union, who raises 1,600 hectares (3,953 acres) of grain crops in Bedfordshire, England. “Farmers can adapt to gradual temperature increases, but extreme weather events have the potential to completely undermine production. It could be drought, it could be too much rain, it could be extreme heat at the wrong time. It’s the extreme that does the damage.”

Fast-changing weather patterns, such as the invasion of Arctic air that pushed the mercury in New York from an unseasonably warm 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 Celsius) on Jan. 6 to a record low of 4 (minus 16) the next day, will only become more commonplace, according to the New York-based Insurance Information Institute. While the world produces enough to provide its 7 billion people with roughly 2,700 calories daily, and hunger across the globe is declining, one in eight people still don’t get enough to eat, some of which can be blamed on drought, the United Nations said.
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Extreme Weather Wreaking Havoc on Food as Farmers Suffer (Original Post) xchrom Jan 2014 OP
recommend phantom power Jan 2014 #1
The Koch brothers operate the Matador cattle company pscot Jan 2014 #2
The temp. swings are the real killers NickB79 Jan 2014 #3
And awaaaay we go! GliderGuider Jan 2014 #4

pscot

(21,023 posts)
2. The Koch brothers operate the Matador cattle company
Fri Jan 17, 2014, 02:43 PM
Jan 2014

that reportedly owns 11,000 cows. One might think that at some point they'd figure out that climate change is bad for that part of their business.

NickB79

(19,109 posts)
3. The temp. swings are the real killers
Sat Jan 18, 2014, 05:36 PM
Jan 2014

When we purchased our house a few years ago, the chatter in the gardening community was that the southern Twin Cities, MN was unofficially now a zone 5 rather the the USDA zone 4. That would mean a whole host of fruit and nut trees once unheard of in MN were now viable here (peaches, quince, English walnut, etc).

So, I put in a huge tree and shrub order to build an edible landscape on our 1.3 acre lot, which included some of these "exotic" varieties.

4 years later, most of them have failed. They either grow strongly yet fail to fruit, or die altogether. The climate has indeed warmed substantially as a whole, but the extreme climate swings either kill the flower buds at the worst possible time, or cause a freeze-thaw action that cracks the bark horribly.

I'm going back to time-tested, zone 3 and 4 rated varieties for the time being.

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