Of course it’s gonna happen in 80 years. But, it won’t happen if you simply Comply
Climate change could spell the end for Midwestern corn, study finds
The midwestern Corn Belt — which roughly covers parts of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas — will be “unsuitable” for cultivating corn by 2100 if climate change continues on its current trajectory, a new study finds.
“The future climate conditions … will significantly reshape biophysical suitability across the Central and Eastern U.S., causing a near collapse of corn cultivation in the Midwestern U.S. by 2100,” the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, concludes.
Using climate and soil data, Emory University environmental studies professor Emily Burchfield modeled where crops would be successfully grown in a warmer future. Burchfield found that under scenarios with high or moderate greenhouse gas emissions, the climatic conditions necessary to grow corn, soy, alfalfa and wheat will all shift notably northward, “with the Corn Belt becoming unsuitable to the cultivation of corn by 2100.”
Computer models. Of course.
In fact, Midwestern farmers have already been successfully adapting to climate change. Due to a variety of technological advances, U.S. farmers today harvest more than five times as much corn per acre as farmers did 100 years ago. Some of these changes, according to a 2018 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have been helpful to combating rising temperatures. For example, because plants have a cooling effect on their local environment, planting closer together has reduced the effects of global warming on corn crops. Farmers also have adjusted to higher temperatures by planting crops earlier in the season and cross-breeding more with more heat-tolerant Mexican varieties of corn.
Yes, because a minuscule 1.5F increase since 1850 has been hard to adapt to.
“It’s hard to gauge what actually is the trend,” Taylor Moreland, owner of Moreland Seed & Soil in Centralia, Mo., told Yahoo News. “In 2012, that was a horrible drought, Midwest-wide, that was a terrible drought and there were massive losses across most farms. 2013 was kind of a drought as well. And then ’14 was awesome, ’15 was extremely wet, to the point where a lot of corn couldn’t get planted at all because if the ground is wet you can’t plant … ’16 was another great year, ’17 was a great year, ’18 was a great year. And then, really, the past three years have been all so wet, where you typically want to plant corn in April and most farmers around here haven’t been able to plant all their corn yet this year at all, because it’s been so wet.”
But Moreland, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, pointed out that the Midwest has always seen wide fluctuations in weather.
“The weather patterns do tend to change,” he said. “If you track back before I was doing this, we had droughts, we had wet years, we had hot years. I remember my grandpa talking about this, how there were a couple years in a row where they’d have crops burn up and the family would be broke.”
Damn, things change. And this is all your fault.
Our distinguished host quoted:
So? We’ll simply annex Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and maybe Ontario!
Really, we ought to do that anyway.
We’re actually taking over Ukraine, nearly the size of the US corn belt. It will become NorthEast Dakota.
I must have been mistaken a couple of weeks ago, but I would have sworn that I drove past a few thousand acres of shoulder high corn here in S.E TX and it was only around 90 that a.m.. Not to mention that my ag property in NC is regularly planted in corn and also soybeans.
Fresh, Texas grown watermelons are in HEB right now. Good and sweet.
if it’s that important stop using if for fuel and use it for what it is intended, food.
Right Bob, corn is a poor motor fuel requiring more energy to produce the ethanol than it yields. While corn does have many industrial uses, it’s best used for bourbon, tacos, and sweet corn to eat.
