Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to climate researcher Nancy Fresco, Alaska could have the potential to feed itself by 2100 – but lots of government intervention is required to kickstart Alaska’s agricultural revolution.
Climate change could enable Alaska to grow more of its own food – now is the time to plan for it
February 4, 2022 12.10am AEDT
Nancy Fresco
SNAP Coordinator, Research Faculty, University of Alaska Fairbanks…
As a climate researcher at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I recently worked with other scholars, farmers and gardeners to begin investigating our state’s agricultural future. We used global climate change models downscaled to the local level, coupled with insights from farmers growing vegetables for local markets and tribal groups interested in gardening and food security. Our goal was to take a preliminary look at what climate change might mean for agriculture in communities across the state, from Nome to Juneau and from Utqiaġvik to Unalaska.
Our research suggests that planning for future decades and even future generations may be crucial for keeping Alaska fed, healthy and economically stable. We have created online tools to help Alaskans start thinking about the possibilities.
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Our climate modeling suggests a dramatically changing future for Alaska crops by 2100, with frost-free seasons extending not just by days, but by weeks or months; cumulative summer heat doubling or more; and the coldest winter days becoming 10 or 15 degrees less extreme.
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Growing more fresh foods here would help Alaska economically and nutritionally – but it won’t happen automatically. To achieve meaningful long-term increases in agriculture, the Alaska Food Policy Council has recommended creating a proactive state-funded nutrition education program, developing more food storage infrastructure, offering financial incentives for expanding agriculture and teaching residents about northern growing methods. The council’s research suggests that the state could realize major benefits from investments in training, technology, support for clustered businesses such as packaging and storage, and programs to foster a farming culture.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-could-enable-alaska-to-grow-more-of-its-own-food-now-is-the-time-to-plan-for-it-174939
The idea that kickstarting Alaskan agriculture would require government intervention is even more absurd than the idea that Alaska will experience dramatic warming over the next century.
Farmers are always on the lookout for low cost land which might be productive.
I remember a very educational radio interview with an Australian marginal desert wheat farmer. He explained he got into it because he couldn’t afford to buy a regular farm, but once you considered capital costs he was making more profit than regular farmers. He only harvested a decent crop two years in five, but leasing vast acreages of marginal land from the government was so cheap, it more than compensated for the bad years.
How many second sons of farmers are there, people with the skills but not the inherited land, who would flock to exploit any new land opened up by global warming? It would be like a new gold rush.
All the Alaskan government would have to do is get out of the way.
They forgot to mention that global warming will also turn Texas into a tundra landscape … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHsjpWmNyFI
10 to 15 deg C warmer … in just 78 years? Wow! That makes even RCP 8.5 seem like a nothing burger by comparison.
Well, don’t build up your seed corn supply just yet, or go out and buy a bunch of tractors and combines based upon this fantasy projection.
Besides, regardless of climate only 1% of the total land area of Alaska is privately owned, with the other 99% owned by the Federal government, the State of Alaska, local governments, and Native tribes. And most of Alaska is not serviced by roads, rail, or other practical transport of agricultural goods. It was such transportation that made mass agriculture feasible through most of the lower 48.
“Somebody’s got to go back and get a sh*tload of Dimes.”
Apparently there’s a toll road on the way to Eden, Alaska
I wonder if Nancy Fresco ever visited the Matanuska Valley, near Anchorage, in the summer growing season? Sure, Alaska is not that warm in summer, but the (near) 24 hours of sunshine make vegetables grow like crazy. The University of Fairbanks needs to check the credentials of Nancy, she seems a little off her meds or something. 10 or 15 degrees by 2100? Definitely off her meds.
“Our climate modeling suggests”
People will still believe this utter garbage. And they do. And its been factchecked by PolitiFact as being true….
I grew up in NJ – “The Garden State”. I think there were gardens before there was a state. AK please take note. If climate change favors growing more food, no doubt you already know what to do. If not, you already know what to do. There. No new programs required.
During the 60s and 70s, a time of declining global temperatures (like now), “knee high by the fourth of July” was a common sign in the southern parts of Minnesota, that the corn crop could be good that year. In the northern parts, the growing season was simply too short to even try to plant corn. The soil was ok, so potatoes were reliable, and in the similar climate of North Dakota, wheat crops were often successful. Farther north in the rich plains of Manitoba the growing season was even more difficult.
If someone wants to spend money speculating on expanding their agricultural base because of global warming, there’s a lot of much more likely places like these to wager it, rather than in Alaska. You might even find some oil if you pick the Dakotas and Montana.
If so Putin might want it back,
The only sensible things anybody is ever going to grow and harvest in Alaska might be reindeer.
Or seals maybe = the fat blobby things that polar bears like to eat so there may be some competition there.
Salmon maybe if some scrap wind turbine towers were dumped in the water, just offshore to get some Iron into the system.
The sun is far too low in the sky for anything else, esp plant material.
It’s the Cumulative Solar Radiation that counts, not any amount of cumulative heat.
Folks living in that part of the world need ultra high-density nutrition – cabbages and turnips wont work.
Don’t the words fail when super intelligentsia, the ones who know all about the quantum mechanics of the the Green House Gas Effect, don’t realise that.
You are what you eat…
Can anyone think of any example of where AGW is not used as an excuse for more government spending?
With energy inexpensive enough, just about anything can be grown anywhere in greenhouses.
In fact, making energy cheaper today will provide immediate benefit to those living today, as well as providing wealth for those who come later, even 80 years later.
Methinks someone should tell the Alaskans.
“We used global climate change models downscaled to the local level”
Oh yeah, that’ll work.
To be fair, if you believe hysterical forecasts, then preparing for a broader crop belt is exactly what we should be doing right now. I wonder why there aren’t more proposals like this.
Leftists are so funny…
They’re basing Alaska’s future agricultural production output on climate model models that are currently running 4~5 standard deviations above UHA6.0 observations, which means the models are completely worthless.
Leftist hacks get around this climate-model disconfirmation by comparing them to frequently manipulated global temperature anomaly datasets that miraculously somehow stay within 2 standard deviations of median climate model predictions..
“Neat Trick”…
They’ll be surfing in Kachemak along the Homer riviera.
Catch some tasty waves and a halibut!
Used to be dinosaurs up there
So yes, it can happen
Except for the coming mile thick ice sheets.
That might throw a wrench into it
We are constantly being encouraged to fear imaginary, unfounded external threats to our existence. The real and proven threat is the power in the hands of ignorant, unscientific politicians, “experts” and policy makers. The more their whims become actions the greater the risk that the quality of our lives and even our lives themselves will come to an end in some catastrophic miscalculation of how nature actually works.
CAGW has jumped the shark right into straight up fiction writing. They’ve tossed the pretense of “science”, and given themselves completely to science fiction. 🤣
In Brazilian Portuguese, “frescura” (the quality of what is “Fresco”; cf. name of the self-proclaimed “climate researcher”) is used to qualify an ingenuous, utopical and simplistic idea…
(in Portugal, “frescura” just means freshness in the sense of fresh salad, cool water, etc.)
This is a common trait amongst leftists, the belief that without government direction, nothing would ever get done. I was recently informed by one, that without government, the poor would always be poor.
Ha! Send some of that warming down here!
Rough week for this trucker. Sent up to Skokie, and Elk Grove Village as the big winter storm came through. There was no way to get back to the yard in Anderson, IN within the legal time.
As I headed to my first stop up in Skokie along the lake just north of Chicago, my right side windshield wiper blade just flew off. Probably ice build up had broken the little plastic retaining clip. The first opportunity to repair it without getting off of I-94 was a toll booth where all the cash lanes are closed and I could pull off onto what were the merge lanes out of traffic.
I carry a spare set of wiper blades at all times and during the winter they’re the heavy duty type. They are stowed in the right side tool box.
To replace the blade required opening the bonnet and climbing up on the steer tire in order to reach the arm. While I was up there I scraped the ice that had built up along the bottom of the windshield. That ice was at least 1/2″ thick and it took some doing.
It took me about 20 minutes to do this repair and get back out on the road.
That day was one of once again reaching out the side window to grab the wiper blade arm on the drivers side and pulling it away from the windshield so it would slap back down against the glass and break off the ice that was accumulating on both tips of the blade.
Heading back knowing the truck stops and rest areas would be full I pulled off on a ramp at exit 215 on I-65 south that I know has wide shoulders and truckers often park at to take my 10 hour break at the end of the 16 hour exception duty time.
Made something to eat and had just laid down in the sleeper when an Indiana State Trooper was banging on my door telling me to move along. It is illegal to park on ramps in Indiana but enforcement is at best spotty. And it is common to see the ramps at the exits where there are truck stops with trucks lined up parked along the shoulders.
But the guy has a badge, a gun, and a ticket book. And I was so pissed off about being rousted by the bonehead I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, even if I did find a place to park. So I drove the 128 miles back to the yard. Ended up working for 22 hours.
Then yesterday morning I was to take off for a Lear Logistics run from Anderson, IN to Romulus, MI then down to Indianapolis and then back to Anderson.
No trouble getting out of my snow drifted driveway in the Toyota FJ. Knowing how things get when we have these storms I arrived at the terminal at 02:30 for an 04:00 departure.
The truck had a pollution control system problem and the mechanics had taken it out of my usual parking spot and into the garage to fix it. And while it was in the garage those plowing the snow at the terminal filled my parking spot with plowed snow.
So when they were done with the truck they parked it in a snow covered spot.
I found the tractor and cleaned the snow off of it. But when I tried to back out I was stuck even when I engaged the interlock so I had four wheels pulling and turned off the traction control which is like having posi-traction. I cleared the piled up snow from the path of the wheels and still could not get out. I could not rock it because the bone head mechanic had put the steer tire right up against the parking block.
So it took an old timers trick to get out. I took a gallon of windshield washer fluid from my right tool box and poured 1/4 gallon over each of the four drive tires. And that did the trick. I backed right out. Clorox bleach will do the same for you folks at home if you happen to get desperate.
Roads were fine. The only problem after I left the yard was at the Lear facility in Indy where it was a total mess. After dropping my trailer in door 64 and getting my signed paperwork I was supposed to hook to an empty to bring back to the yard in Anderson.
Thankfully the roads were in great shape, but the Lear facility in Indy had not been plowed. After putting the trailer I brought in door 64 I was to hook to an empty trailer to bring back to the yard.
There were two empty trailers there but I wasn’t going to back under either one because if I had I was sure I would be stuck.
BTW I used a total of 4 gallons of windshield washer fluid today, not including the one I poured over the tires.
If we just allow history to guide us, it’s well known that 78 years before Ohio became a state, government bureaucrats planned diligently for food storage infrastructure. Thanks entirely to their efforts back in 1725, Ohio successfully became a state in 1803 and became an agricultural powerhouse.
Farmers’ daughters (and some sons possibly) flocked to the well planned communities from Eastern states. Taking full advantage of the investments in training, technology, support for clustered businesses such as packaging and storage, and programs to foster a farming culture, the inexperienced and utterly government-dependent farmers were empowered to thrive!
Where would the early pioneers of the American frontier have been without the foresight displayed by the true heroes, our government bureaucrats?
I would say that the gormless idiot who wrote this piece of tosh is one of the 97% of climate scientists who support the global warming consensus and bolster the ninnies in power and in the media . She should go out and get a real job but alas she seems to lack the qualifications
This looks like an advertisement for the Alaska Food Policy Council. I looked at two reports linked to in the article. Both reports are unsigned. Lots of thought went into them. The 2021 Alaska Food Security Investment Recommendations estimates $40 million to start with. (The population of Alaska is about 710,000 people. The number of AFPC members is unknown).
The nonprofit Council does “increase awareness about Alaska food issues”. I assume that they’ll also increase awareness of inflation.