OtPR the other day suggested compensation as drought mitigation: If the goal is drought resilience, we could use money instead of water to keep farm communities intact until a wet year. If it is important that farm workers in Mendota live decent lives during droughts, we don’t have to find non-existent water for their employers’ farms. We …
Continue reading ‘In Brazil’s drought, compensating the poor’ »
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
Using NASA data, some scientists built these maps of California farm land fallowed during the drought. Green is planted, brown is fallowed:
I guess it’s as good as any starting place here to say that Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is one of the best book’s I’ve read. I come at this from the privilege of growing up in white American suburbia. Baptist’s book suggests this is my story, that the …
On the new Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, Brett Walton: The 2013 survey reveals two long-term trends in U.S. agriculture: farms are producing more food while using less water, and farms in the typically rainy East are increasingly investing in irrigation equipment that is more commonly found in the arid West.
In High Country News, Cally Carswell has a story about the criollo (“a name that is endlessly fun to recite. These are criollo cows. (Try it: cree-oh-yo.)”: There’s anecdotal evidence that criollo will eat more of the shrubs and tougher grasses on degraded grasslands, but no hard data yet on whether that amounts to a …
Continue reading ‘Annals of adaptation: Cally Carswell on desert cattle’ »
Despite California’s epic drought, there were Central Valley persimmons this afternoon in Talin Market, Albuquerque’s international district grocer, when my sister, Lisa, and I stopped by to pick up a few things. They were priced at $1.29 a pound, with the box label suggesting they had come all the way from Gridley, Calif., a little …
My quick, poorly thought out answer to the question in the post title would have been “yes”, but OtPR once again has pointed out the error in my thinking. The wealthiest California farmers, OtPR argues, have locked themselves into high value but permanent crops (especially almonds) that leave them less flexibility to respond to climate …
Continue reading ‘Does affluence make you more resilient to drought?’ »
Jim Carlton, in the Wall Street Journal last week (behind paywall, sorry*) does something I wish there was more of – looking at what happens when drought ends. In particular, a visit to Wyoming, where it was dry for a spell, then got wet: “You can get out of drought if everything goes right, and …