For its third annual conference in its Celebration of Our Agricultural Community series, the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown (Otsego County in upstate New York) addressed Climate Change and Its Impact on Farming in Central New York. The bad news, of course, is that we are on an irrevocable path to an ever-greater crisis, a crisis that will be aggravated by unscientific responses to climate change likely to be embraced by the new political administration in Washington. The good news is that central New York – as with much of the northeast – won't initially be as badly affected as the rest of the country, and already has made strides to address these problems.
Lengnick has spent over three decades as a researcher and educator – and, not incidentally, a farmer. She spent ten years leading the sustainable agriculture program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, which she left to found the firm Cultivating Resilience to offer planning services to communities, businesses, and government. She's also the author of Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2015).
Drilling down to specifics, Dr. Todd Walter pointed out that in addition to getting warmer, we're getting wetter. "And we have more extreme precipitation," he said. But it doesn't necessarily serve us when we need it, as the recent headlines-prompting droughts have shown. Thus, drought resilience is becoming another climate-change challenge.
The conference's afternoon session kicked off with a more comprehensive look at the science of climate change. Dr. Michael Hoffman, executive director of Cornell's Institute for Climate Smart Solutions, emphasized the need for greenhouse gases, but showed some sobering slides describing the soaring measure of excess and its fallout.
Meeting these challenges, he said, will require more resilient crops, which even now are being studied through the use of drones that can record the height, reflectiveness, and starch content of plants in a field, along with renewable energy sources and other sophisticated tools – a number of which can be found at http://climatesmartfarming.org including calculators for Growing Degree Days, Water Deficit, and Nitrogen Management.
The finish of the conference became much more technical, offering practical advice for the farmers among the crowd. Lengnick returned with strategic approaches to managing climate risk, dividing it into three basic strategies: resistance, resilience, and transformation. Resistance calls for using financial and physical assets to reduce exposure risks, while the more potentially successful resilience practices include a diversification of production and better management of a farm's ecosystem processes. Transformation, the most radical, includes moving from annuals to perennials or, at least, inter-cropping them, and moving from a concentrated animal feeding operation to a more integrated approach that includes pasture-based and even multi-species grazing.
"All of it is completely do-able," she said. "It's already being done all over the country, and it's being done in some way or other with all the types of food we eat." Lengnick's book, Resilient Agriculture, is the result of time she spent with over two dozen farmers around the country, "farmers who made changes on their own, with no government help, but wth their own supportives families to depend on." It's that combination of science and local innovation that's going to save us in the years ahead.