A historical look at grain growth in North America shows that past generations of farmers have coped with significant climate changes.
Adapting agriculture to higher temperatures won't be easy, but new research shows that when it comes to wheat, farmers have adapted their practices to suit the climate in centuries past.
Economists Alan Olmstead of the University of California, Davis, and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor found that from 1839 to 2007, a time over which median annual rainfall dropped by half and average annual temperatures dropped by 3.7 °C in North America, wheat production expanded into areas once thought to be too arid, variable or harsh to cultivate1. During this period, wheat output rose by 26-fold in the US and by more than 270-fold in Canada. Farmers managed to increase their output through innovations such as the use of hardier wheat varieties and mechanized equipment, with most of the distributional shift in wheat production having occurred by 1929, long before the Green Revolution of the 1950s.
The challenges facing farmers in the future are comparable to those faced by farmers in the past, say the researchers, who contend that developing new cultivars should facilitate adaptation.
References
Olmstead, A. L. & Rhode, P. W. Adapting North American wheat production to climatic challenges, 1839-2009. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 10.1073/pnas.1008279108 (2010).
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Heffernan, O. Insights on adaptation. Nature Clim Change (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1028
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1028
