Another warning about heat and crops

No, the sky is not falling. But yields will. Food and water costs will rise.

Eminent scientists reported in the eminent journal Nature last week that a crop catastrophe is ahead thanks to a warming climate.

No kidding. Can you hear an echo?

Corn yields could drop by 28% by the end of the century, lead author Andrew Hultgren of the University of Illinois wrote, along with scientists from Berkeley, Stanford and all the fine places.

Not just the poor will suffer from climate change. Wealthy farmers in places like Iowa will not be able to fully adapt.

It’s the heat, stupid.

This is not news. Scientists from Iowa State University previously estimated in National Climate Assessments that corn yields in southern Iowa could drop a third by mid-century. The number of days above 90 degrees will make pollination exceedingly difficult for the southern Corn Belt and western Great Plains.

We knew that. The latest published, peer-reviewed research just backs it up.

We also have been told repeatedly that disease and pestilence will challenge production. Ever heard of bird flu? A deadly cattle disease spread by Asian ticks was reported for the first time in Iowa last week, coming up from Missouri. The vet med people in Ames worry about encephalitis in swine.

So what are we doing about it?

Well, since it’s going to be so bad there is not much you can do but do what you are doing. That would be our way. Sen. Joni Ernst summed it up: We’re all gonna die, for heaven’s sake. It explains our thinking. We’re stuck in our rut.

Inertia is the dominant political force in Iowa. A lot of money is invested in the chemistry of life as we know it. It funds our legislators, shapes our research and makes the Iowa River a putrid toxic flow of nitrate, antibiotics, e coli and mud from Britt on down.

Eventually the chemistry won’t stand the heat. The weeds already defy the spray nozzle. Our Black Gold rolled down the river and into the Delta. Nature demands that we change but we don’t. Not at the pace that is required, anyhow. Not according to the smart people who get published in Nature.

That leads to all sorts of scenarios. Feed costs rise. Protein costs rise faster. Will Storm Lake continue to be a slaughterhouse town a few decades hence? We are told to conserve water. So is Des Moines. Costs of water are rapidly rising here. Our systems are not keeping up. Can we afford to water the hogs and poultry?

These are serious questions that Iowans generally scoff at. Until you run out of water, as they are in the southern Plains.

Windmills? We don’t need your stinking wind mills when you can frack gas.

Too much dust? Regulate it? Sure, we chuckle. Like the dust is going to kill you. Actually, it can. The research shows a higher lung cancer rate associated with the dew of hog manure misting our air in tiny particles, and settling on playground equipment with a thin veneer. It’s true, kids. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. That doesn’t mean we will act.

Storms grow more furious. We expand drainage systems to cope. The torrents are carving out river banks. Our soil base is degrading, which we cover in petrochemicals to prop up yields.

The farm bill is a couple years overdue. They say that the pittance we devote to conservation will hold, but the Trump Administration already killed a bunch of conservation contracts. Don’t bank on the government digging us out.

We believe that technology will save us. Even the great scientist Norman Borlaug did not believe this. He warned that our existing production system would last only a couple generations. The Green Revolution was an immediate response to alleviate suffering in Latin America and India. Hunger was a function of population, Borlaug believed. We are asking too much of Earth.

These are not musings of the Woke but of the ag scientists who have not been bought off by corporate capture.

Ingenuity and genetics can take you only so far. Iowa State agronomists and the University of Illinois are serious about agriculture. They warn us that it is getting nasty out there.

If you can’t water the hogs in Storm Lake or the cattle in Amarillo, we are in trouble. It’s pretty simple. You don’t need a PhD to read the water bill, up, up and up. A new water tower rises above The City Beautiful along with the costs of feeding the world. It’s real enough in the here and now. We keep talking about the weather but who does anything about it?

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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