The combination of war in Ukraine’s grain basket, and heat domes settled over key grain producing regions around the world is raising the specter of climate related food shortages much earlier than most observers would have expected.
Well before it was warm enough to plant seedlings in the ground, farmer Micah Barritt began nursing crops like watermelon, eggplant and tomatoes — eventually transplanting them from his greenhouse into rich Vermont soil, hoping for a bountiful fall harvest.
Within a few hours last week, those hopes were washed away when flood waters inundated the small farm, destroying a harvest with a value he estimated at $250,000. He still hopes to replant short-season crops like mustard greens, spinach, bok choy and kale.
“The loss of the crops is a very tangible way to measure the flood, but the loss of the work is hard to measure,” said Barritt, one of five co-owners of Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm in Burlington, Vermont. “We’re all grieving and heartbroken because of this.”
That heartbreak was felt by farmers in several Northeast states after floods dealt a devastating blow at the worst possible time — when many plants were too early to harvest, but are now too late to replant in the region’s abbreviated growing season.
Storms dumped up to two months’ worth of rain over a couple of days in parts of the region, surpassing the amount that fell when Tropical Storm Irene blew through in 2011, causing major flooding. Officials have called last week’s flooding Vermont’s worst natural disaster since floods in 1927.
Atmospheric scientists say floods occurring in different parts of the world are fueled by climate change, with storms forming in a warmer atmosphere, making extreme rainfall more frequent. The additional warming scientists predict is coming will only make it worse.
What is frightening to scientists is the pattern of heat domes getting “locked in” to a global pattern, forming heat domes concurrently over key growing areas of the planet.
A stagnant jet stream is giving rise to severe heat across much of the globe, and climate change may be making it worse, a new study finds.
Around the end of June, Ryan Krenk didn’t want to even look at his corn fields.
Deep dryness had scorched the crop in southeast Nebraska. The plants had a grayish hue instead of the usual vibrant green and were just touching his calf or even ankle when they should have been above his head.
“All I really wanted to do was just go home and not look at it,” Krenk said. “Because it was sickening, just absolutely sickening. I didn’t want the memory.”
As the weeks ticked by without any rainfall, Krenk was sure the corn would die.
“It looked like death,” he said. “And I said ‘I don’t think it’s going to see tomorrow.’ And it’s still somehow here, several tomorrows later.”
Early July rains provided a lifeline to many crops in the Midwest and Great Plains. Now Krenk’s corn is taller and greener.
“The turnaround is magical,” he said. “But we need more rain, that’s for sure. We are by far not out of the woods. Another dry week and we’re right back where we were.”
It will take consistent precipitation to nourish crops and improve the drought, which has been baking soil and plants for years in portions of the Midwest and Great Plains.
The region went into this summer with a lack of soil moisture that Jenny Rees, an extension educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said was unlike anything she’d witnessed.
“I’ve never seen a year where we started the season with no subsoil moisture,” she said. “Even in the 2012 drought we had a bit of a head start with some subsoil moisture. This year is at a whole other level because we didn’t have that.”
Then Mother Nature dealt an incredibly dry May and June — the time when many states can get up to 60% of their annual precipitation.
“When you miss precipitation during those two months, you know there’s going to be trouble,” said Doug Kluck, a climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We didn’t have that moisture to bank for later in the summer when things typically get even drier.”
