From the UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, where I’m not sure they have seen this graph:
Now, if only Africa could solve its political problems, get reliable energy, and reliable roads for transport…and they’d have the kind of success we enjoy in the United States.
UPDATE: Fred Berple notes in comments:
Maize production:
Malawi – 1961
815000 tons
Malawi – 2011
3699150 tons
so after 50 years of global warming, Malawi is producing more than 4 times as much maize.
http://www.foodsecurityportal.org/api/countries/fao-production-maize?order=__num_2011&sort=asc
Press release:
Crop breeding is not keeping pace with climate change
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
Crop yields will fall within the next decade due to climate change unless immediate action is taken to speed up the introduction of new and improved varieties, experts have warned.
The research, led by the University of Leeds and published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, focusses on maize in Africa but the underlying processes affect crops across the tropics.
Study lead author Professor Andy Challinor, from the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds, said: “In Africa, gradually rising temperatures and more droughts and heatwaves caused by climate change will have an impact on maize.
“We looked in particular at the effect of temperature on crop durations, which is the length of time between planting and harvesting. Higher temperatures mean shorter durations and hence less time to accumulate biomass and yield.”
It takes anywhere between 10 and 30 years to breed a new crop variety and have it adopted by farmers. The rate at which temperatures are increasing across the tropics means that by the time the crop is in the field it is being grown in warmer temperatures that it was developed in.
By looking at a range of data on farming, regulatory policy, markets and technologies, the researchers developed average, best and worst case scenarios for current crop breeding systems.
The researchers found that crop duration will become significantly shorter by as early as 2018 in some locations and by 2031 in the majority of maize-growing regions in Africa. Only the most optimistic assessment – in which farming, policy, markets and technology all combine to make new varieties in 10 years – showed crops staying matched to temperatures between now and 2050.
The research team, comprising experts in agriculture, climate and social science, looked at the options for ensuring that crops can be developed and delivered to the field more quickly. These range from improved biochemical screening techniques to more socially-centred measures, such as improving government policies on breeding trials and farmers’ access to markets.
Dr Andy Jarvis, from CIAT (International Centre for Tropical Agriculture), said: “Investment in agricultural research to develop and disseminate new seed technologies is one of the best investments we can make for climate adaptation. Climate funds could be used to help the world’s farmers stay several steps ahead of climate change, with major benefits for global food security.”
The researchers have also proposed an alternative plan: use global climate models to determine future temperatures, then heat greenhouses to those temperatures and develop new crop varieties there.
Professor Challinor said: “The challenge here is in knowing what future emissions will be and ensuring that climate models can produce accurate enough information on future temperatures based on those emissions.
“At the Priestley Centre, researchers are working on these challenges by improving climate models and targeting their use directly at solving such problems.”
###
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“Higher temperatures give shorter durations ”
The corn is growing too fast. Perhaps they are talking about when you estimate your growing season and match that to the number of days printed on the seed bag. Your lowers number would grow faster to be mature in time. If you guess shorter than the observed growing season, you get less yield. Yes, the corn stops growing, at least in Minnesota, then it starts drying on the stalk, to get its moisture content to, it will not spoil in the bin.
I had frost on my golf course this past Saturday in Rosebud Alberta at the same time the weatherman was reporting a temperature of 7 degrees celsius in Calgary about 45 miles away as the crow flies. Now if our actual temperature was -1.6 and Calgary was 7.4 that is 9 C or 15 F .We are talking a big enough difference to start talking about fraud. It is hard to argue with frost folks it kills your lettuce.
Minimum temperatures vary strongly over short distances, particularly on windless nights (which is when frost happens). If you live in a hollow the temperature can easily be 5 C lower than a few miles away, or 10 C less than in a big city like Calgary with UHI.
You can probably have a 5 C° difference between the standard two meter height and on the ground if the terrain is flat. I was on a weather mail list for a while that had someone who frequently posted his weather shelter temperature and his garden ground level temp. He frequently had big differences.
Professor Challinor from the, er, “‘Priestly’ international Centre in Leeds,
re the problem of rising temps contra crop production … But It’ll be okay
because ‘Priestly’ researchers are working on climate models to address
the problem. )
#B^)
Crop yields are going to plummet in Europe and it has nothing to do with climate change, but rather another green policy and push to ban the use of Glyphosate. The ban is very little to do with science but the listing of Glyphosate as a possibly carcinogenic (although unlikely) by WHO gave a political window for the push. The issue has split the farmer groups with some using it as a push about a point of sale difference that the producers in Europe can use to keep cheap food imports out. So farmer position on the matter depends on how reliant you are on Glyphosate for your crop.
So the prediction will probably come true at least in Europe but have nothing to do with climate change but connected by green politics.
Oh yes. How many times I have heard the same spiel form agricultural scientists throughout my 50 yr career in farming. They have to find something new and ‘improved’.
By coincidence the Economist newspaper run a special report last week on the same issue, from a global perspective: “will we feed the masses in 50 years time?” This is all rather ironical as they completely missed the point that economics is the greatest force behind yield and overall production.
My guesstimate is that the world’s farmers (including Africans) could easily lift production by 30% within 3 years should profits allow it. Most of us know what to do and what to use to lift yields and production. In most cases the limiting factor is fertilizer. This is the first input to be cut when profits drop. A second thing that happens when profits rise is that marginal land is converted or more fully utilised. Aside from intensively farmed areas in Europe there are huge tracts of underutilised land around the world – especially in Africa. There are also large areas of land situated where irrigation would be an option. But first must come profits!
As for weather, drought and climate change: show me a country where current drought and annual rainfall over a decade is worse than other periods on record. Sorry, big continents have big droughts.
Exactly. A liberal plant and follow story. The pile on. All BS.
Mostly agree, but availability of water is much more important than fertiliser. It’s where a substantial portion of the increased yields have come from over the last century. A hydrologist told me that we now sequester ~50% of rainfall to grow crops.
It’s a water planet. It’s not completely clear how much rain falls at sea (if you thought sea surface temperatures were hard to measure, try rainfall! and TRMM doesn’t observe the polar regions) but it’s definitely a lot. Nor do we *sequester* rainfall: if water falls on crops, it runs off into streams, goes into groundwater, or is transpired right back, just as it would if other plants were there. It’s still part of the water cycle. Crop-land is about 11% of the global land area. I find it difficult to believe that even 50% of the
rain that falls on land falls on that 11%, it’s not even 50% of the land we use for crops+forests+pastures+
other non-crop farming.
He said “sequester”, as in “reserve for the use of”.
But first must come profits!
======================
no doubt some politician will get the bright idea that $100 / bushel corn would help boost production and bring in a lot of votes from the corn belt.
maybe if we could find a way to use all the excess corn, maybe for example find a way to burn it up in cars, that would help boost the price.
Hydro Tasmania is the largest water manager in Australia. If they aren’t sequestering rainfall, where do you think the water to power the electricity generators comes from? The sky? Oh wait, that is where the water comes from. But I thought that’s what we call rainfall. Ever hear of the Aswan Dam in Egypt that sequesters all of the water of the longest river in the world?
Only one possible answer…we must immediately create more CO2 to feed the plants, as that is what they use to grow healthy.
Well, a study of soybean yields showed greatest improvement at the equator, and US studies that show grain temperature and drought tolerance is increasing.
Further more CO2 increases temperature and drought tolerance.
Something has to be done to debar from grant access the scientists that crank out these vaporware studies.
As has been pointed out in times past people learnt what were reliable grain crops for their locale. Probably best shown by Dr Johnson (source Wikipedia).
My love of oatmeal must come from my 1/128th or 1/256th Scottish ancestry. 😉 I should really refigure those numbers.
I read a while back that one of the problems with food self sufficiency in Africa was the switch to “Western” crops that grow best in more temperate zones. If the traditional crops like millet were grown, crop yields would be higher and more food would be available for the local populations.
An article in WaPo several years ago bemoaned the insufficiency of food in many African countries. A former aid worker wrote to the editor and informed them that the front page picture of the mother whose children did not have enough to eat showed the mother sitting under a native fruit tree. According to the worker, many native foods were being shunned in favor of “Western” foods, resulting in artificial shortages. She claimed that proper utilization of local wild food sources would substantially decrease hunger.
Zimbabwe is the classic example of how to turn a food exporting country into a food importing country.
We saw the same thing when we lived in PNG. Some Australian or Kiwi would be living in PNG, with a large thriving dairy farm. Papua New Guinea is about 10 S latitude, in the heart of the tropics. So a dairy farm in these conditions is quite an accomplishment.
The locals, seeing the rich white man would want to rich as well. They would think, well if the white man can do it, so can we. After all, the cows do all the work. And the white man and his family would be driven from the land through threats, harassment and often times much worse. Much worse. And a couple of years later the dairy farm would be bankrupt, the cows eaten for food and the land taken over by squatters and subsistence farmers.
Until within just a few years PNG went from being self sufficient in milk to a net importer. Repeat this across a wide range of industries and you have Zimbabwe.
Rather confused by this since wheat and a few others can be grown over the winter and oatmeal is a spring only crop.
So they study the basket case continent of the globe and somehow blame climate.
https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3877/crop_breeding_is_not_keeping_pace_with_climate_change
Interesting. The study is just about Africa. Further, Africa has a deforestation problem (which has caused the loss of the Kilimanjaro snow cap among other things). This makes it hotter and drier.
Further, maize isn’t a native African crop. Maize is a native crop in the Americas.
http://harvestchoice.org/labs/yield-gap-rainfed-maize
Here is an article on the actual and potential maize production in Africa.
From what I can tell, the authors of the Leeds study literally don’t know what they are talking about.
“At the Priestley Centre, researchers are working on these challenges by improving climate models and targeting their use directly at solving such problems.”
They should rather concentrate on improving their low level research skills.
It’s about fixation on and attribution to one factor while excluding (or “accommodating”) all others.
You can “prove” geocentrism: Just take one of those mechanical solar-system models and let it spin as designed — but hold the earth in a fixed place.
Jim Dunnigan’s Wargame Trick?
…Now, if only Africa could solve its political problems, get reliable energy, and reliable roads for transport…and they’d have the kind of success we enjoy in the United States….
You know, I’m not all that sure that Africa has ‘political problems’.
That used to be the standard belief back in the 1960s, when everyone chanted “if only Africans behaved like the West they would be rich..”. But today, I can’t see much difference between African and Western politicians.
It’s a shame. The West raised itself by its own bootstraps. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants needed better communications and more reliable transport, so they built the canal network, then the railway network, and the telegraph network, and improved roads. All paid for by commercial profit. In the last half of the last century, the big charities and Western governments tried to emulate this advance by donating aid to Africa, and instead of a commercial infrastructure being built, we ended up with a structure of dependency and bribery, which grew up to distribute this largesse.
Which is now what we have amongst politicians of all flavours, all around the world….
Well said.
But today, I can’t see much difference between African and Western politicians.
Except for the firing squads.
Seeing as how there’s “no difference”, I’ll take the latter, please.
Except for the firing squads.
=================
The only way you can remove a corrupt bureaucracy. Politicians you can vote out, but the bureaucrats will never fire one of their own, lest it set a dangerous precedent. the incompetent bureaucrat is simply given a different job, where they can do no harm. After all, it isn’t like you need to turn a profit.
Pot meet Kettle. I had to laugh at the sentence “Now, if only Africa could solve its political problems, get reliable energy, and reliable roads for transport…and they’d have the kind of success we enjoy in the United States.” It was either laugh or get annoyed. I live in Africa, and moved here from the USA. I guess it depends on ones metric of “success”. Of course there’s sweeping problems and atrocities in Africa. Yet the USA (single nation) is not exempt from endemic problems either (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/m7ev2k6) and not a shining star of success. Lastly, Trump as the USA’s first African president? https://youtu.be/2FPrJxTvgdQ
You site a comedy show for substantiation and expect people here to take you seriously? I don’t believe ANYTHING you said, Mr. Propaganda ; )
Those red and blue lines in the graph look awfully like the carbon dioxide curve don’t they just.
Naaaaaaah, no possible connection.
Also, is it not a wonder to anyone how ‘rich’ (as in lotsa money) countries are places with ‘rich’ (as in lotsa fertility) soils? No conceivable connection or way that would work??
Think about what defines a ‘rich’ soil.
Of course, no-one got rich by spending money so is it inconceivable that that (money) richness came from exploiting the soil/dirt – just the same way as fossil fuels are exploited = used and not replaced.
Once you’ve defined what rich dirt is, is it *that* big a leap to say that its exploitation is what is causing CO2 levels in the sky to rise?
Blaming fossil fuels is the easy way out – the way that lazy people, people who can’t be bothered to think, people who don’t like ‘awkward’ questions and people who will lay the blame, endlessly, on someone else.
People who are feeding themselves, on contemporary doctor’s recommendation every 2 hours, a depressant substance.
Carbohydrate
And what else do depressed people do, they panic easily, they have an over-active startle response.
Climate Alarmism anyone????
No-one will want to know, because that really is a difficult question. Its so easy, and the modern way, to hypocritically hide behind the lie that ‘you care’
“The challenge here is in knowing what future emissions will be and ensuring that climate models can produce accurate enough information on future temperatures based on those emissions.”
Yes. Predicting the future is the challenge. Which is something climate models have never been able to do regardless of “emmissions”, because they are fatally flawed. Because climate, unfortunately for them doesn’t care one whit what “emissions” are.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
What a goddamed joke! A map of crop distributions in the U.S. shows that sorghum, like corn, a C4 plant, thrives in much hotter and drier climates than does corn. The protein and carbohydrate content is very similar to that of corn, so if it gets a lot warmer (questionable in the tropics) and drier (also questionable), farmers will simply switch from corn to sorghum. Big processors like ADM will simply change their technology a bit, and the world’s excessive food production will continue. You could even turn grain sorghum into ethanol to keep the price up, which is why we burn up half of our corn every year (which amounts to 4% of world grain production–not a small fraction).
Editors eye. Usual excuses. But the article includes the sentence: “The rate at which temperatures are increasing across the tropics means that by the time the crop is in the field it is being grown in warmer temperatures that it was developed in.”
Should the final that” be “than”?
Ian M.
The original reads:
“It takes anywhere between 10 and 30 years to breed a new crop variety and have it adopted by farmers. The rate at which temperatures are increasing across the tropics means that by the time the crop is in the field it is being grown in warmer temperatures than it was developed in.”
http://climate.leeds.ac.uk/news/crop-breeding-is-not-keeping-pace-with-climate-change/
In all the fuss about GMOs and CAGW scaremongering you are missing the point of this paper: The CGIAR want their slice of any climate change money going around.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is a global network of research centres which each have a focus on a particular set of crops or an agro-cimatic region (CIMMYT – maize and wheat, CIP – potatoes, CIAT – Tropical agriculture etc.). They get most of their funds from national and international donors and every year there is another big scramble for the next chunk of funding. The World Bank houses the secretariat and they have bought into the climate change narrative in a big way (probably because the WB itself is controlled by national donors) therefore the CGIAR has to get onto the same bandwagon or lose out to groups who toe the line.
I don’t know the Leeds group, but all of the supporting comment was from CIAT and you can bet that there is a lot of back-scratching going on.
Personally, I would rather see this money go to plant breeding than to stupid anti-CO2 programs as there are likely to be some positive outcomes, especially for farmers in developing countries where there isn’t enough of an agricultural industry to attract the commercial sector.
Yep, Rob – you nailed it
I was interested to see the old canard about Monsanto suing Canadian farmers for incidental crop contamination. As it happens I read the details of the case. And it was pretty straightforward. Incidental wind contamination would have happened primarily at the edges of the fields, and in a fairly small percentage of the plants. The actual percentage something over 50%, and throughout the fields. In other words, the farmers were lying about it being accidental, and the judge understood that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeiser
Wind carries GM pollen record distances:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6421-wind-carries-gm-pollen-record-distances/
There’s probably an advantage to weeds becoming resistant to glyphosate, but nobody has ever managed to satisfactorily explain what the advantage is.
Stress from heat/drought cause cell membrane changes & there are many enzymes embedded there that function better when there is membrane stability. Drought also increases oxidative stress & the resulting higher proportion of reactive oxygen (“ROS”) causes changes. Any analysis of an introduced plant or newly bred plant that showed less of a rise under drought conditions for tissue hydrogen peroxide (ROS) & malondial-peroxide (marker for lipid membrane damage) + at the same time
increased total flavenoids (protective) means better growth potential under drought/heat.
Edible grain (seed) plants, as distinct from leafy greens, require leaf made sugar (“source”) getting to the seed (‘sink’). This involves a feedback that basically means boosting the capacity
of “sink” for the “source” to move out what leaf is making helps the leaf (source) keep up the pace of growth.
Pathways to get leaf sourced “sugar” into a “sink” requires many
electron toggling (reduction/oxidation “redox” reactions) drought/temperature affect. The “sugar” carrier proteins & also
the site on cell membrane mobilizing ‘sugar” loading into circulation (phloem) for moving along both rely on a particular molecular grouping ( -SH). Plants which incorporate better capability in these 2 aspects do better in drought/temperature.
Leaf “sugar” synthesizing enzymes(“SPS” sucrose phosphate synthase & fructose -1,6-bis-phosphate) also go up if leaf doesn’t start to raise it’s ratio of starch (to sugar), which to some
degree can be related to drought/temperature reducing phosphorus (P) re-supply to plant. Any plant demonstrating increased SPS levels is ideal because more of this enzyme in the
leaf actually up-regulates “sink” capacity; including instigating new “sink” sites to come into action (ex: more grains fill).
Furthermore, when SPS enzyme levels go up in fully expanded mature(“old”) leaves in drought/temperature stressed plants selected for growing this causes sustained photo-synthesis &
delayed leaf senescence (“use it or lose it”). The result from this
is more development in the entire plant, which boosts biomass.
The “sink” enzyme (invertase) that converts “sugar” (sucrose) to other carbons (fructose & UDP-glucose which in turn are able to
produce plant oil from that carbon involves a chain of events. The late stage (involving “ACC” acetylCoA carboxylase enzyme) here too depends on “redox” reactions for maximum function of the enzyme ACC; the oil making ( synthesis) dynamic is more efficient when more “reduction” redox reactions can take place.
Breeding for drought/temperature resistance which sustains “redox” capability might increase dry matter yield ~10% & at the
same time increase the content of oil in that plant’s seed by 20%
under those adverse growing conditions.
Drought & water stress lead to lower levels of the NO3- nitrogen
assimilation enzyme (nitrate reductase). Plant traits which both tolerate environmental induced stresses & have root structure that favors phosphorus (P) “foraging” from the soil are going to act in concert to increase back up the number of NO3- assimilation enzymes; this in turn will increase growth & subsequently yield at harvest.
I have elsewhere in thread discussions detailed some of the influence of higher CO2 on NO3- assimilation & am not going to parse the dynamic for crop development. I can be more specific about where to look for that if anyone asks.
Knowing the length of the growing season might be helpful, but there is no way on God’s green earth yield for maize can be divined from that.
Yield is improved when weeds, pathogens, pests, parasites and labor demands per hectare are under control.
For example, Striga, or witchweed,, reduces corn yields 30-80%. The picture below shows what it looks like. It joins itself to the corn plant under ground and the purple flower then appears attached to the corn plant. Witchweed is destroying 2.5 million hectares.
Striga was controlled in this plot by a seed coat of herbicide.
Labor is also a problem because younger people do not want to stay home on farms bent over picking weeds, and so they move to the cities. Herbicides spare the women and children and reduce the labor input per hectare. In many places in Africa the farmers only plant as much as the women can clear of weeds first.
Climate Change is causing elephants to be smaller.
Therefore; corn grown as high as an elephant’s eye probably has less yield.
“The researchers have also proposed an alternative plan: use global climate models to determine future temperatures, then heat greenhouses to those temperatures and develop new crop varieties there.”
I propose they skip the green houses and simulate the growing in computers. The result would be far more consistent and predictable.
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/graphs_tables/indicator3_2013_ProductionGrain.PNG
I agreed in most part of world especially in tropics, food insecurity is real threat and almost declared national disaster. This is a result of recurrent droughts and unreliable rainfall bearing in mind about 70% of developed countries rely on rain-fed agriculture. All this is happening as consequence to increased temperatures due to climate change hence increased emission of green house gases,more incidences of pests and diseases e.t.c that have direct effect to crop production and breeding. To curb the climate change pace, some countries are researching on improved varieties by crop breeding through application of biotechnology technologies.
Florida Agriculture,Volume 76, no.4. June 2016.
David Jackson et. al. at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have discovered a gene which tells stem cells how to grow. Stimulation of this protein pathway(in the leaf) increased corn yields by up to 50 per cent in lab trials.