Climate change affects every living thing on earth. Of particular concern is how RCC will affect our ability to farm. Where we grow crops today will be quite different from where we can grow them tomorrow, because patterns of temperature and precipitation are in a heightened state of flux. Greenhouse gases have added their own influence to these changing patterns and unfortunately will also contribute to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere over the next hundred years, even if we were to stop using fossil fuels today, which of course we cannot. The carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide components of burning fossil fuels have also had a significant effect on the world’s oceans, resulting in a more acidic environment. If this trend continues, the ocean’s crustaceans, mollusks, and coral reefs will be in big trouble, since calcium carbonate, a major component of their shells and matrix, cannot form at pH values much below 8.0. The pH value of the ocean is now at 8.06; just twenty-five years ago it was 8.16.
The “direction” of climate changes favors those life forms that can most quickly adjust to them. Researchers used to think that plants would be the most severely challenged when it came to moving to a new comfort zone, due to the simple fact that they have no visible means of locomotion. Recent evidence seems to contradict this belief. For example, trees can relocate over great distances by seed dispersal mechanisms (wind, floods, birds, insects), and can germinate in a variety of places, some of which, even in a rapidly changing environment, will match exactly with their optimal ecological tolerances. Farmers are unfortunately wedded to the land they till, so when growing conditions change, favoring one country over another, the growers most adversely affected are those who have to remain in their own environment. It is inevitable that conflicts will flare up when more optimal growing conditions shift over the border into an adjacent country. Conflict has already occurred over the scarcity of water in many places. For example, in 2008, during the height of the twenty-five-year drought plaguing the Southeastern region of the United States, the states of Florida and Alabama sued the state of Georgia for withholding water releases from Lake Lanier. Atlanta gets its drinking water from that lake, but the Chattahoochee River below the hydroelectric dam eventually courses through parts of Florida and Alabama on its way to the ocean. The argument over the amount of released water considered minimally essential to satisfy the needs of those living downstream is, as of this writing, still in court and unresolved. Ironically, the following year, Georgia experienced massive flooding in September, in which an enormous quantity of topsoil was lost. Perhaps Georgia should charge Alabama and Florida for the additional water and soil it gave up to them.
The definition of how much is enough is largely determined by the haves and not by the have-nots. It’s been widely speculated that the next war in the Middle East will be over water, not religion or oil. Food shortages now exist in many places, but as explained earlier, those are mostly due to the poor distribution of food, not the lack of it. Of course there are exceptions, and India was one of those when in 2006 it was forced to seek assistance from Canada and Australia in procuring enough wheat to meet the minimal needs of its people, who make up one-fourth of the earth’s population. India’s wheat harvest was severely reduced that year when a freak set of thunderstorms in the Punjab produced hail that knocked the grains off the ripened spears of wheat, rendering much of the crop unharvestable. In another part of the world and in that same year, rice blast—a devastating fungal disease of the rice plant, whose spores are dispersed by wind—created temporary food shortages in many parts of Southeast Asia, inducing food riots and hoarding of rice. Even the United States felt the repercussions from that farming disaster, and for several weeks rice was rationed to one 50 pound bag per customer per week at most of the nationwide discount food store chains. Did climate change cause these events, or were they just random perturbations in the weather? One thing is certain: If these events become routine, then we will have no choice but to attribute them to RCC.
Adjusting to a changing climate is what nature is all about, through a genetic process in which a mutant is selected from among many others in a given species that by mere chance turns out to be the fittest one for that particular environmental change. It’s nature’s hedge against extinction caused by the sudden rise of a set of adverse conditions. One can imagine how this might manifest itself on a string of interconnected volcanic islands in which change can occur moment to moment. In fact, it was just such a natural setting that triggered much of Charles Darwin’s thinking when he visited the Galápagos Islands. By tracking the distribution of finch species, each of which had a different strength of beak, he was able to match them up with their food sources, a wide variety of plants that produced nuts and seeds of varying hardness. The stronger a bird’s beak, the more likely it was that the bird fed on nuts and seeds that only its beak could crack open. In this way, the finches were able to evolve into sets of related species, occupying the same island and reducing the competition for food.
The process that produces these kinds of closely related species is known as adaptive radiation. As a given mutant plant species by chance produced a harder seedpod, avoiding overharvesting by finches with beaks too weak to open them, a mutant finch with a slightly stronger beak could take advantage of this untouched food supply, giving it a distinct advantage. In this way all of the finch species arose from a common ancestor, the original colonist, when the Galápagos Islands were just a single landmass. The oldest island is around 5 million years old, while the youngest is only 2 million years old. Darwin had the advantage of actually seeing all the different-aged islands during his five-week stay, and concluded correctly that nature has the ability to adjust to a rapidly changing environment by the process he came to refer to as natural selection. What he identified was nature’s version of the arms race, expressed in a somewhat more peaceful manner. Today, scientists employing state-of-the-art molecular biological methods have confirmed Darwin’s original observations on the link between beak and seed morphology, proving that in each case, single genes are all that is necessary to account for the changes in both beak strength and seed hardness. In fact, scientists have even been able to identify the original founder finch species. Indeed, how remarkable and magnificent is nature.
Why is it important to understand the fundamental biological process of natural selection? It’s because we have gone down a different evolutionary path, in which we have employed artificial selection, as opposed to natural selection, to generate all of our food-bearing plants. None of them resembles the wild plant it was derived from. Our food crops have been picked and fussed over by generations of farmers, who began this journey some ten thousand years ago. They tailored them for characteristics that favored ease of cultivation and maximum yield of edible parts.
Corn is a good example of what happens when we discover an accident of nature and then capitalize on it (see chapter 2 for more details). Corn (Zea mays) started out as a small, inconspicuous grass in south-central Mexico. By chance, a mutant arose that had larger-than-normal kernels. It was easy to grow and had obvious nutritional advantages, so it quickly became adopted by the native tribes in the area of the Balsas Valley around 8,700 years ago. They nurtured and coaxed it into a plant that became totally dependent on irrigation for its survival. Increased water meant that maize (old-style corn) could spend more energy making reproductive structures (kernels). Over time, perhaps several hundred years, maize became fully domesticated. It was a sustainable, storable food source that grew wherever water could be provided, and it rapidly transformed cultures up and down the North and South American landscapes. If today’s hybrid corn, the kind typically grown throughout the American Midwest, were to become reintroduced into the same environment in which it arose some nine thousand years ago and then left to its own devices, it would surely die.
It is obvious, therefore, that the traits we value as consumers of plants have little or nothing to do with the ones that enabled their ancestors to withstand severe environmental changes associated w
ith droughts, floods, plant diseases, insect pests, and wide fluctuations in temperature. In short, we have bred the “wildness” out of them in favor of things that favor their growth as irrigated, pampered, well-fed monocultures, or “cultivars.” If an environmental change should occur that exceeds the narrow tolerance limits for a given cultivar, then that crop will surely fail in that environment. It would be like turning our pet lap dogs loose in the woods and expecting them to survive on their own. Today in the United States, more than 90 percent of all seeds used in large-scale agriculture, regardless of the crop, are produced by just three companies. They are all highly domesticated strains with very narrow tolerance limits for temperature and precipitation. More than half the world’s farmland is suboptimal with respect to most commercial crops and will only get worse over time. This is especially true throughout the tropics, in which the soils are mere inches thick and do not have much in the way of stored nutrients. The tropics are also the region of our planet experiencing the highest rates of population growth.
Throughout the ages, most of our crops (with the possible exception of wheat) have been carefully selected for growth in a series of narrow climate regimes. For this reason, regions of the world have become known for producing certain crops, but not all of them. It’s worth emphasizing again that the conditions that plants depend on most relate to annual patterns of temperature and precipitation. Corn, rice, potatoes, and a wide variety of garden vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, wine grapes, and the like, all have their own sets of ideal growth conditions. That is why most varieties of domesticated rice come from wet, semi-tropical climates, while potatoes do best in colder, harsher environments.
When ideal conditions for a given crop species occur over a single growing season, farmers rejoice, and yields approach the plant’s theoretical limit of productivity. Harvests are plentiful and the gods of agriculture are praised by all. However, when something such as a plant disease, insect pest, hailstorm, severe flood, or prolonged drought takes over, then all can be lost, sometimes overnight in the case of a killing frost or windstorm. Often, the only recourse is to plow the crop under and begin again next year. It is unusual to experience ideal growing conditions for more than a few years in a row, no matter where on earth we choose to observe them. Just ask any winemaker. This is the basis for vintage years. Rare indeed is the production of two consecutive years of great wine from the same vineyard, regardless of the growing region or the variety of grape. Quite often, however, most vintners manage to sell most of their annual production, vintage or no, but at much reduced prices compared to their best years. Most would agree that farming is not the easiest way to get rich, or even to scratch out a living in places where the conditions are marginal.
Environmental agronomists predict, based in large part on recent data regarding RCC, that crop failures will become more frequent in places in which they are now considered rare, and will become the rule rather than the exception in places in which they now regularly occur. Unfortunately, in this case forewarned is not forearmed. We simply don’t have the luxury of time to breed into our cash crops the characteristics they will need to survive in an increasingly harsh environment, even though we think we know how to proceed in the laboratory. Modifying plants to resist droughts, ward off new plant diseases, and avoid attack from insect pests takes time and lots of funding, not to mention social acceptance for genetically modified plants. The environmental changes are just too global and rapid to expect much progress in these disparate areas over the next twenty-five years.
To further put things into perspective, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006, estimated that over the next thirty years, RCC will cost the governments of the world a combined total of around $74 trillion. Expenses associated with rising ocean levels, significant loss of crops, increases in vector-borne disease transmission like malaria and the West Nile virus, and increased health care costs associated with these catastrophic events will consume the lion’s share of federal budgets. Little will be left for social innovation, let alone critical research on new drugs, vaccines, and other life-saving technologies.
With farms around the world experiencing increased loss of yield due to more widely fluctuating patterns of weather, it’s no wonder that in most developed countries farm insurance is a regular addition to their national budgets. Providing food for their citizens is an essential countrywide activity that benefits everyone, so farming must be able to continue next year even if the crops failed miserably this year. Subsidies are essential to keep the process moving forward. For example, in 2008 the U.S. Congress approved the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act to the level of $288 billion. This enhanced version of the 2003 Farm Bill included a healthy slice of that pie earmarked for farm insurance, and subsidies favoring home-grown crops over similar crops produced in other countries. The majority of the remaining funds was destined to pay U.S. farmers to grow food for agriculturally challenged countries. There were few congressional dissenters on the 2008 bill, as every state stood to benefit. On the other hand, the World Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and other international governing bodies have repeatedly criticized the United States and other developed countries for creating economic situations that prevent fair trade of agricultural products, particularly those originating from less developed countries. While protecting a country’s own farmers from competition and guaranteeing them a predictable income, such a shortsighted economic strategy prevents those disadvantaged nations from economically advancing into the more developed world. It’s a valid point that needs addressing if we are to eventually behave as a true global community.
Yet even some of the most advantaged countries with respect to agriculture have experienced severe droughts and floods over the last five years, which has raised awareness as to the need to develop better strategies for food security and safety. More frequent outbreaks of food-borne infectious agents from organisms such as salmonella, cyclospora, and E. coli 0157:H7 have created a sense of urgency for the need to regroup and incorporate alternate technologies for growing food that is both safe to eat and locally produced, and hence more controllable from a food safety perspective.
The 2009 recall of all peanut-based products in the United States was the largest and most expensive recall of any food product in its history, including recalls involving ground meats contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. The future of agriculture, at least as practiced outdoors, looks grim. Three examples will serve to illustrate just how much trouble we have created for our children and their children over the next twenty-five to fifty years if nothing changes.
John Steinbeck, had he lived long enough, would be truly amazed to learn that the migration West from the dust bowl created yet another more intractable agricultural dilemma, one totally unrelated to the labor movement or the civil rights of migrant farm workers. In the 1950s an agricultural strategy was adopted by a wide swath of farm cooperatives that would eventually irreparably trash an entire region of the Golden State, as large-scale farming took hold in the Central Valley of California and never left. A medium-size city’s worth of migrant workers from Mexico joined the scene, and crops began appearing on the supermarket shelves of the world. The Central Valley became known as the new Garden of Eden for truck crops of all kinds: nuts, citrus fruits, vegetables, and table grapes. Industries that specialized in value-added products such as catsup, tomato sauces, and canned fruits all became ensconced in California. Hunt, Del Monte, Heinz, Dole, Sun-Maid, and other giant food producers made their fortunes there. Together with the dairy industry, agriculture has mushroomed into a $65-billion-a-year industry, with Salinas as its unofficial capital. All this growing requires huge amounts of water. The annual spring snowmelt from the Sierra Madres in California was not enough, and California growers petitioned the state of California to purchase water rights from the Colorado River, so they did. Snowpack in the Rocky Mountains averaged some 20 feet annually back in the 1980s and the stat
e of Colorado had no particular use for the excess after it took its share, so it willingly signed away its water rights for twenty-year periods of time (for a price, of course). Massive irrigation schemes were quickly constructed to take advantage of this situation. Soon, California water was abundant and cheap. Flood irrigation was the rule for many crops, including the almond industry. It was easy to implement and economical, too.
The Central Valley is one of the hottest, driest places in America, with average daily temperatures in the summer approaching 110°F. Ecologically, the majority of the land was a mixed-grass prairie completely surrounded by high mountains; hence the dry, hot environment. It’s about the least likely place to attempt to farm in North America without heroic assistance from hydroelectric projects. In addition to needing extra water, since the soil types are nutrient-stingy and favor semidesert plants, almost all of California’s main crops require lots of fertilizers. As crops became the norm, uninvited guests—insects and weeds—prompted the heavy application of a new generation of pesticides and herbicides. Year after year, through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, California growers boasted the highest per capita income compared to any other farm group in the world, attracting even more agriculture to the Central Valley.
Then one day, a funny thing happened. Actually, no one laughed. Ponds started to form by groundwater welling up from saturated aquifers, creating an artificial wetlandlike ecology in many localities throughout the 300-mile-long valley. Migrating waterfowl began using these newfound bodies of water to nest along their shores. But things were not what they seemed to be. Birds of all species soon began to die in large numbers. Testing revealed that many ponds were contaminated with high levels of selenium and other heavy metals, trace components of fertilizers that were being used indiscriminately by nearly every large farm operation. Pesticide levels were high, too. Most disturbing was the water’s high salt content. The toxic groundwater had reached the bedrock below and was now headed up toward the surface; each year’s flood irrigation activity brought it that much closer to the taproots of almond and citrus trees.
The Vertical Farm Page 8