by Judith Willson

Created on: August 13, 2010   Last Updated: October 11, 2010

Farming is dependent on the weather.  Too little rain can ruin a crop and flooding can destroy fields.  Some plants thrive in hot climates and cannot cope with frost, while others are the opposite.  Climate is not the same as weather, which is notoriously unpredictable.  However the overall weather trends that make climate are changing.  Agriculture needs to adapt in order to cope with these changes, and it needs to change quickly. 

Global warming does not just mean everywhere getting gradually hotter, climate is much more complex.  Climate change is leading to more rain is some places, less rain in others, storms where previously they were a rarity, hotter summers, and counter-intuitively colder winters.  Agriculture the world over is being affected.  While individual countries are experiencing different changes there are some basic changes that need to be made to farming methods worldwide. 

Sustainable farming methods

Agriculture has in fact been adding to the problem of climate change even as it suffers the consequences.  Livestock produce methane, a greenhouse gas, in enormous quantities.  The rainforests that would absorb carbon dioxide are destroyed to make way for cattle farming and palm oil plantations.  Desertification is exacerbated by climate change and often caused in the first place by unsustainable farming techniques.  Desertification means there is less fertile land to grow anything on.

There needs to be a move away from dangerous agricultural practices and more emphasis placed on growing food crops, rather than raising livestock.  Livestock requires far more land than plants and the world cannot cope with this.  While it is not necessary for the world to go vegetarian, a reduction in the amount of meat consumed is probably essential.

Mixed crops

The trend in agriculture has been growing vast monocrops of the same variety of the same crop in the same place year after year.  This is a dangerous practice as the weather becomes more unpredictable and extreme.  If a crop is vulnerable to frost then an unexpected cold snap could ruin it.  A pest multiplying in response to a hotter or more humid summer is likely to be specific.  If a crop happens to be its choice then the pest is going to destroy it all.  If more than one crop is grown then chances are at least one will survive even if unexpected weather, disease, or pests destroys another. 

Preparation

Climatologists can provide an indication of how climate change is likely to affect a particular area.  This could be land rendered unusable by rising sea levels, regular flooding, droughts, and/or temperature changes.  The land that will remain fit to farm and the plants that will survive the changes need to be investigated and farmers need to be ready to change their methods.

If you come from a country where agriculture is not the basis of the economy it is easy to see climate change in terms of uncomfortable lifestyle changes or annoyingly bad weather.  Governments telling you to drive less or hot sticky summers might be your main concerns.  These are trivial however.  We can live without cars and cope with unseasonable weather.  We can’t survive without food though, and how agriculture responds to and copes with climate change is a far more important issue.

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