Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Farmers hoping for a little government climate cash to help them through a string of adverse seasons should be very careful what they wish for.
Politicians say nothing, but US farmers are increasingly terrified by it – climate change
Art Cullen
Fri 19 Oct 2018 23.00 AEDTResearch forecasts Iowa corn yields could drop in half within the next half-century thanks to extreme weather – yet it’s not part of the political conversation
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This year, crops in north-west Iowa are looking spotty. Up into Minnesota they were battered by spring storms and late planting, and then inundated again in late summer. Where they aren’t washed out, they’re weedy or punky. If you go south in Buena Vista county, where I live in Storm Lake, the corn stands tall and firm.
Welcome to climate change, Iowa-style.
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This drainage system is delivering runoff rich in farm fertilizer to the Mississippi river complex and the Gulf of Mexico, where the nitrate from Iowa and Illinois corn fields is growing a dead zone the size of New Jersey. The shrimping industry is being deprived of oxygen so Iowa farmers can chase 200 bushels of corn per acre – and hope against hope that corn will somehow increase in price as we plow up every last acre.
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Few politicians in the five states around here are talking about regulating agriculture in an era of warmer and wetter nights and long droughts. Yet farmers are paying attention. Hatfield says that conventional producers in the Raccoon river watershed are starting to focus on profitability reports from sustainable agriculture groups like the Practical Farmers of Iowa. They advocate a rotating crop-livestock land use with more diverse plantings that can restore soil and make farmers more resilient – and get them off that expensive chemical jones. Because, the government doesn’t appear equipped to deal with it.
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My thought to farmers – invite the politicians to your table at your peril.
The bait is the offer of climate cash – the possibility of easier access to disaster relief, more cover for lean times, for when a string of bad seasons hammer farm finances. The hook is increased political regulation of farming practices, a long list of impractical government enforced ideas dreamed up by city based green elitists, starting with mandatory reductions in the use of nitrate fertiliser.
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When I drove I-70, 80 and US 30 in July, I saw a lot of corn and beans. None of it looked weedy or punky. Especially the Raccoon river basin.
NW Iowa up into Mn was prairie because it was to dry for trees to grow there.
Too dry.
Should we be advertising Gaurdian pap here? Iowa farmers dont read it. It seems Europe is aiming all their efforts at killong off US resistance to marxinesd.
It’s hard to find any folks who farm here in the “Forgottonia” part of Illinois who buy into man-made climate. We are mostly lamenting the loss of our regional coal fired power stations because there is no more free sulfur for the fields. It now costs us more in soil amendment. besides that, brownouts and interruptions are much more common on the rural grid than when we had plants nearer to us.
Is there anything more on the Illinois rural grid situation? Many wind turbines in rural Illinois.
They used interstate market regulation to make the coal and nuclear plants in mid-to-southern Illinois unprofitable for the owners. Dynegy has been sold, so it’s anybody’s guess as to where it will go from here. We depend mostly on Ameren MO generation here at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, having had precipitator-equipped plants shut down and scrapped ten or more years before the end of their usable lifespans. All we have close is a scrubber equipped plant at Portage DeSoux that Ameren operates and it doesn’t put out enough sulfur to enrich the fields downwind.
To be honest I have no idea how much of the lost gen capacity is sometimes picked up by wind, but having worked in the power industry I can appreciate what a strain this is on the dispatchers. Automation helps, but sometimes the power has to be shunted too far, too fast when you have no local generation.
The Guardian is a ‘coast elite’s’ paper. It considers farmers or anybody of Iowa deplorables, who should be overseen, regulated, taxed, subsidised and taxed again. The elite is full of knowitalls who are ready to give farming advice which you take at your peril.
The ultimate goal is to reduce farming, empty sparsely inhabited ‘flyover’ areas, and only produce little amounts of ideologically produced food. It used to be Steiner style biodynamic vitalism, but has later hidden its roots and reduced to antiproductivism, where low productivity is hailed as “sustainability’.
“Politicians say nothing, but US farmers are increasingly terrified by it – climate change”
Oh really? Well, politicians say nothing, but the MSM, being firmly onboard the CAGW bandwagon continually scream lies about “climate change”, and fewer and fewer people are paying attention any more, and I highly doubt farmers are.
It’s more as if they wonder why farmers are not terrified!
They want to tax your air, tax any food you grow, send you taxes to the poor of the world and all the need now is tax sex and they got everything covered in the new green wonderland.
Farmers already get TONS and TONS of govenment handouts. Check how much money goes to farm states. I have no sympathy for anything they end up losing due to greed and apathy concerning politics versus science.
Wasn’t it a politician — the name Reagan comes to mind — who said the most terrifiying nine words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”?
Sadly, the Guardian is a destructive influence in order sell copy! Bad news and ever increasing state control!
I will,never understand why intelligent people read it! Ah. They are not intelligent. Silly me.
Government mismanagement of agricultural science is nothing new. The policies of Soviet Russia bureaucrats, based on fake genetics science, caused the starvation of millions in the 1930’s. Yet we seem to have not learned from these mistakes:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/
I’m surprised that the Atlantic would acknowledge that. I consider them as left as the Grauniad.
Guardian went all in crazy on climate and eco doom a long time ago. Their writers are eco-fanatics, not climate scientists. Energy and agriculture have always been the two overriding concerns of eco fanatics. Witness their many wars against energy: Hydroelectricity, Nuclear power, fossil fuel. Their obsessions over organic farming (with unsafe pesticides), hatred and fear of GMOs. But these people are loonies, Refuting them is shooting fish in a barrel. I rather WUWT stuck to climate science.
Eliminate fossil fuels and you will have mass starvation. In the mean time, there will be massive surpluses of agricultural commodities and anybody who eats will be a winner.
Sure, farmers complain about the weather. Who doesn’t? But farmers are not dumb. Those who have been working the land for decades can see changes over time better than those who sit in front of a computer all day.
I wonder how many who have commented here actually read the article. It’s always interesting to see what is omitted when a story is excerpted.
“[W]hat were considered 500-year floods in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines 30 years ago are now considered 100-year floods. Iowa has been getting soggier in spring and fall, with scary dry spells interspersed, and more humid at night by as much as a third since 1980.
“Everyone knows it has been getting wetter and weirder, especially Dr Gene Takle, a Nobel prize-winning climate scientist at Iowa State University. Takle predicted 20 years ago the floods we see today, already linking it to climate change back then. Farmers just saw ponding and called the tiling company to install more. We’re on our way to doubling the size of the northern Iowa drainage system in the past 30 years as the upper midwest has grown more humid and extreme.
“This drainage system is delivering runoff rich in farm fertilizer to the Mississippi river complex and the Gulf of Mexico”
Has anyone suggested mandatory reductions in the use of nitrate fertilizer? Or is that just something dreamed up by Eric?
Just maybe farmers are beginning to realize that things need to change.
“We are losing soil at two to three tons an acre a year. Nature can regenerate the soil at only a half-ton a year. So we are washing our black gold down the river four to six times faster than we can regrow it.
This would seem to be a problem. Sure, farmers could change on their own, but any investment they would need to make could set them at a disadvantage compared to other farmers; this is why some might favor regulation.
“Because we have less soil, the corn and soya beans are starting to show it in lower protein in the kernel or pod. Corn is yielding higher starch content, notes agronomist Dr Rick Cruse of Iowa State.”
The other issue here could be that increased CO2 can lead to lower N, which means less protein. This may not be an issue for human consumption, but it could when it comes to animal feed.
But all this is apparently just stupid climate change BS, according to many of the comments here. They know better than Iowa farmers … it’s just weather.
Kristi,
The weather and climate moves through cycles and it has for centuries all around the world .
You must have read about the dust bowl period in the 1930s in the mid west of the USA and the high temperatures that occurred at the same time .
Have you not read about the Medieval Warm period and the climate optimum .
The Vikings farmed in Greenland but that is not possible now .
The loss of soil is not connected to climate change and has been going on for ever before the prairies were ever farmed .
No till and strip till are used to prevent soil erosion .
I have been farming for 60 years in New Zealand and our soil is our greatest asset and we try to conserve it and not let it wash away.
This article is BS and makes assumptions that CO2 is weirding the weather when there is absolutely no proof .