Farmers face dire future

Old and new ways explored to adapt to the severe challenges posed to the food supply by climate change. By Bloomberg Reporters

For Australian cattle farmer Jody Brown, the most chilling evidence of drought is the silence. Trees stand still, the warbling of birds is gone. Lizards and emus have long departed, while kangaroo mothers, unable to sustain offspring, kick baby joeys from their pouches, leaving them to perish in the devastating heat.

“You just feel like you’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic scene,” 37-year-old Brown said from her family’s ranch in Queensland’s central west.

The constant dryness means her cattle herd has dwindled to around 400, down from 1,100 at its peak in 2002, and at times there have been no animals on the land at all. The native grasses, once green sustenance, have disintegrated into grey ash.

The world is facing a new era of rapidly increasing food prices that could push almost 2 billion more people into hunger in a worst-case climate crisis.

Confronting the dire predictions, farmers have begun to adapt. On Brown’s ranch in Australia, she’s experimenting with regenerative-farming practices better suited to drought. And across the globe, farmers are swapping crops, switching seeds, increasing irrigation and even putting face masks on their cows in the battle to both increase output and reduce their own emissions.

Meanwhile, companies including Syngenta Group, the Swiss agrichemicals giant, are developing new varieties for vegetables like cabbages that are more resistant to extreme weather.

“We’ve got to adapt,” Brown said. She’s exploring alternatives to traditional grazing methods that don’t push the land as hard, like grouping together livestock into tighter, more compact groups and rotating them quickly

across paddocks.

“Potentially, there were always better ways of doing things, but you just didn’t notice because you weren’t put under the pressure that climate change puts you under,” she said.

It’s a fight against the floods, drought, frost and scorching heat that have plagued farms from Brazil to Canada and Vietnam, which scientists predict will only worsen in the decades ahead.

Global crop yields could fall about 30% because of climate change, while food demand is expected to jump 50% in the coming decades, according to United Nations estimates.

Fisheries and water supplies are increasingly threatened, too, said Zitouni Ould-Dada, deputy director of the office of climate change, biodiversity and environment for Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

One of the biggest challenges for farmers is that there isn’t currently the large-scale coordination or access to funds that would be critical to undertake the kind of massive transformation that’s needed.

“If you have to deal with millions of farmers around the world, that you have to coordinate, that’s a huge ask,” said Monika Zurek, senior researcher with the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

The FAO called on leaders attending the recent COP26 climate summit to pledge more global actions to help farmers scale up solutions. It is targeting annual investments of US$40 billion to $50 billion through 2030 to fund things like innovation in digital agriculture.

Without widespread change, the result could be a spiral higher for food prices that will hit importing nations particularly hard.

“There were always better ways of doing things, but you just didn’t notice because you weren’t put under the pressure that climate change puts you under”

JODY BROWN Australian cattle farmer

Here’s a close look at some of the measures being taken by farmers to adapt to new challenges:

Brazil: Lucas Lancha Alves de Oliveira is making a drastic change on his farm in the countryside of Sao Paulo state. He’s ripping out half his coffee trees to plant corn and soybeans instead.

It’s a bold move because the trees are typically an investment meant to last years, but Oliveira is being forced to change course after coffee crops were slammed first by drought and then an extreme frost — a toxic combination for the sensitive trees.

But the shift won’t last forever. After next year’s harvest, Oliveira will start to replant coffee trees gradually, with an important change: the crops will be fully irrigated. It’s a huge upfront cost, but given the extreme drought he’s seen over several years, Oliveira believes it’s worth the expense.

South Africa: Francois Slabbert, a farmer in the Northern Cape, says the shift in seasons is forcing grape growers to sow other crops like pecan nuts. Where winters usually occurred between mid-May and mid-August, now they don’t start until about a month later, exposing grape farmers to frost that damages their crop.

While it take as long as 11 years for pecan trees to start yielding nuts, the crop can be lucrative as about 95% of production in South Africa is exported, Slabbert said.

“It takes time, and there’s a huge economic impact to the shift,” he said. “But when you’ve done it, when you’ve completed it, it’s good in terms of the turnover.”

Russia: Evgeniy Agoshkin has been in agriculture for 20 years, growing wheat and corn along with other crops in the rich Voronezh region, south of Moscow. But prolonged drought over

several years has prompted him to move some 750 kilometres to the northeast into the Ulyanovsk region.

In Ulyanovsk and in some of Russia’s northern regions, “people have started to plant grain, corn, sunflower seeds, which generally wasn’t possible 20 years ago”, Agoshkin said. “Now it’s all become possible.”

France: The vineyard at the farm that Samuel Masse’s family has run for more than 20 generations has been battered by both heatwaves and freezes in the past few seasons. This year’s grape yield dropped 70% from a spring cold snap, and the relentless weather extremes means he’s no longer willing to bet on just one crop, as the operation has done for more than 100 years.

But Masse’s plans to plant 200 olive trees this autumn were postponed by rains and financial constraints from the farm’s frost losses, highlighting the challenges growers face in making such shifts. The grove might now go in next year, and he’s also weighing planting figs, pomegranates or almonds in the future.

“We don’t know now what is a normal year because we always get something,” Masse said. “The problem now is how we do the shift and how fast we do it.”

India: Rice, one of the world’s major staples, is also a big emitter of methane, as flooded paddy fields block oxygen and allow bacteria to thrive. But farmers like Prasan Kumar Biswal in the eastern state of Odisha are pioneering new methods. On half of his four acres, he carefully spreads out seedlings and alternates between wetting and drying the fields. The plant’s roots grow more deeply, and the yield improves.

His cousin, Jagannath Biswal, still uses conventional flooding on all his fields, because it helps to keep weeds at bay at a time when labour is too costly to manage them manually.

“Our forefathers have taught us about flooding the rice fields,” he said. “I have never tried to grow rice with less water.”

The Philippines: Raffy Aromin, in Cavite province south of Manila, says producing lettuce and cabbage has changed a lot in the five years that he’s been farming. Extreme afternoon heat in October means crops start to wilt.

As a solution, Aromin uses plastic that can protect against harsh ultraviolet rays to cover his vegetables. He produces as many as 200 kilogrammes a week, which he supplies to a local supermarket chain, saying the plastic saves about 80% of his food crops.

“The Filipino farmers are fighters,” he said, predicting that he’ll remain in farming for many more years.

“Our families rely on farming for their livelihood. We have to give it a shot.”