The U.S. Wheat Crop Is in Trouble | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Wheat Crop Is in Trouble

gizmodo.com

From speaking with several farmers in different regions of the US - having unplanned weather extremes has caused loss of many crops and the loss is growing every year. If there wasnt so much development effort spent on making gmo seeds that can withstand more extreme climate conditions we would be at a much worse place. We would literally be without some major crops. Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change

> Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change

While having anyone affected is sad, if we are going to qualify the sadness, isn't this the least sad outcome? I would be much more sad if the farmers in regions that cared the most about fighting against climate change were the ones first affected.

I’m sorry, what?

I feel like that’s a normal human thing to say. People usually say it’s sad when people are affected by bad things, and don’t put a great deal of thought into every implication of how they phrase things. I don’t know, maybe you’re more a fan of karmic justice than of sad irony.

Climate change increasingly affecting people denying climate change makes it more likely they will one day accept it. I don't know how true that is, but that's my view on this particular line of thought.

Karma is believed to work across lifetimes. Without it we'd not be free to make mistakes. So is more about reincarnation, and not about revenge, justice systems or retribution. Misguided belief in karma may wither away at sense of necessary fairness (dharma), which is also karma.

I think the "sadly" there is supposed to be the other way around. That is supposed to be "sadly, the farmers affected believe the least in fighting climate change."

Except that affects everyone who depends on wheat.

Politics luckily go out the window when it means yields. Many crops in the US today are planted with genetically modified seeds. For crops like corn, soy, cotton, and others, over 90% of the acreage in the US is genetically modified.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/charts...

I don't think GMO crops can survive droughts: they still need water.

There are drought resistant crop varieties (both GMO and non GMO kind). Problem is that the drought resistant ones usually have lower yield and farmers in general prefer prefer higher yield kind. The GMO ones usually manage to keep the yield high while achieving good drought resistance.

But yes when the drought is severe enough it will kill any crop no matter what species or variety. Though usually drought does not result in total crop loss but lower yield.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/march/drought-tole...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6651533/

>Sadly the major brunt of such a disaster would affect farmers in regions of the US that believes the least in fighting against climate change

Hopefully it will cause them to reconsider their position on climate change.

I can't imagine why it would. "Droughts have always happened, and this is just bad luck. Climate always changes. Climate change is a hoax designed to put family farms out of business and make us get all of our food from China."

If they've made it this far denying science, I don't see any reason why this would change anything. It's not as if a shift in climate change stance would reduce droughts this year or his decade.

Sharing a quote near the end of the article, which I feel was very striking.

> Ortiz-Bobea coauthored a study … found that climate change has already made global farming productivity 21% lower than it could have been—the equivalent of making no improvements in productivity for seven years.

> The varieties of wheat hit hard by the drought and the heat in those states are what are known as soft white, and it’s the only place in the U.S. that grows this kind of wheat. Soft white wheat is good for pastries and the like because of its low protein content, which makes it less stretchy than traditional flour. But wheat kernels in the Pacific Northwest are shriveling due to the heat and the drought, upping their protein content—and meaning that a lot of the crop that will be harvested won’t be suitable for the soft wheat market.

Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested

>Super interesting... The heat is changing the types of products we can make from the wheat harvested

The opposite is more likely. Pastry/cake flour has low protein content. That's a big contributor to the delicate items made with it. More protein content than that is what Americans call all-purpose flour. Of course it's better for less delicate items, like muffins, where a balance of tenderness and stability are beneficial. More protein than that is bread flour (though it's not produced from soft wheat like pastry flour), and higher still is high-gluten flour.

Ultimately, then, if there's less soft white wheat flour available, we're not apt to get new products from the harvested wheat. We may, though, get new products from alternative baking approaches people determine to replace the pastry flour if there's ample shortage and/or excessively high cost for that flour.

Watching the Pacific Northwest heatwave I can’t help but think that regional climate is going to change much faster than what laymen like myself would expect.

120 degree dry air temperatures produce desert conditions. I can’t imagine that the temperate rainforest of the PNW would last a decade with that kind of weather.

Yes, people forget that the 2° warming you keep hearing are global averages, including the oceans. If you restrict yourself to temperatures over land, the warming is much stronger. In addition, a small rise in average temperatures leads to a large rise in the number of days with high temperatures. Here for example are charts showing the number of days >30°C in Germany since the fifties: https://twitter.com/DWD_klima/status/1407023635798319106/pho... They have already roughly doubled since the eighties and global warming is just starting to get serious.

The forest part of PNW didn’t experience 120 degree weather. Additionally the event was highly atypical even with climate change and is estimated to be a 1 in 1000 years event due to various unlucky factors coming together. Climate change only contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures in this recent PNW heatwave.

More info about how this weather event came about and the misattribution to climate change from an atmospheric science professor who is the foremost expert on northwest climate: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-ca... https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...

> The forest part of PNW didn’t experience 120 degree weather.

Because forests provides cooling.

I agree that misinformation is endemic, but I also agree that liberals love to fall on their swords for tiny missteps which is then used as ammo by real deniers which erroneously puts the two on equal footing. We're at the point where yes, maybe misinformative fear is necessary? Eh, maybe not. I dunno. But I hate how scientists nitpick themselves to death while Trumpers trash reality.

Why would you think that when it was a heat dome produced by an anomalous high pressure system forcing winds downslope over mountainous ridges, increasing pressure and temperature in the process. Texas experienced a single digit week long blizzard this year, but I'm not expecting it to turn into Colorado.

Wheat yields are doing fine, despite the alarmism, and you can see for yourself (scroll to wheat and view the PNG graphs by year):

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/index....

Texas had a blizzard because the polar vortex dropped down from the Arctic due to record warming[1]

Climate change is going to make things weird. Not everyone is going to get warmer. Some models show Europe entering an Ice Age due to a slow down of the gulf stream.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-w...

Models are not effective at predicting weather outcomes even four weeks into the future. In non-linear dynamic systems, uncertainty is an exponential function of time. If some models show europe getting colder and some models show europe getting warmer, what are we doing except covering all possibilities? How do you distinguish which model is the most accurate one?

For example, I was told from a young age, global warming is going to cause the ice caps to melt, and yet:

The arctic sea ice volume is at 30 year median this summer:

http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickn...

And Greenland is having an anamolously cold summer, gaining in ice instead of losing ice as it normally does to summer melt:

http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

And Antarctic sea ice is above average:

https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentr...

That is some nice cherry picking. Similar to how the Texas blizzard worked, the Greenland surface conditions are a result of the heat dome. From your own source[1]. I will be the first to admit that claiming the Texas Blizzard and the Heat dome were both directly due to climate change is a little disingenuous. But these things are definitely not normal, and one impact of climate change is that we will be getting a lot more chaos similar to these recent events.

And regrading your concerns about the modeling. I agree, the uncertainty is real and quite frankly that should scare you and everyone else. There is simply no way for humans to fully understand all of the different mechanisms at play. We are entering uncharted territory. We might get lucky and some dampening feedback emerges that we did not account for that moderates the climate impacts. Or we might get very unlucky and kick off a mechanism that results in our oceans boiling off killing all life. Most likely, we will end up somewhere in the middle of those two extremes and it will take quite a while before we get there. But once again, the uncertainty is massive. So we are essentially rolling the dice on the future of humanity all so a handful of fossil fuel executives can continue to line their pockets.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/PolarPortal/status/14112805173166...

I'm not cherry picking July 12th. Temperature anomaly maps like what they're showing there on Twitter are highly variable and flux a great deal. See [1] for example and hit play. I'm talking about the entire summer ice gain in Greenland for 2021. The heat dome was a fleeting thing and the summer ice gains have been registering even in June and have continued even as the heat dome as subsided.

There is no scenario where 400ppm CO2 has ever led to any of the extreme events you are casually throwing out there as realistic possibilities. We have geological evidence of Earth's CO2 concentration and climate history going back 500 million years. We know it was close to 7000 ppm during the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. We know it was in the thousands of ppm for most of life's existence on this planet. We know the oceans didn't boil off.

What we know from geology is that not only is the planet extremely antifragile, life itself is as well and always adapts to the always changing climate. Nature has thrown many curve balls, including Laschamp events that caused the Earth's magnetic field to flip for a few hundred years, which led to mass extinctions in the southern hemisphere and some say, the end of the Neanderthals [2]. Or more recently, the Younger Dryas 12 thousand years ago, where temps returned to ice age levels before rapidly warming to above modern day levels [3], and also caused mass extinctions of many animals including wooly mammoths, American lions, saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and so much more [3].

And those two events happened with CO2 levels at less than half of what they are today. Of course, we wouldn't ever want CO2 levels to go below 150ppm, because at that level photosynthesis is not possible and all plant life chokes and dies (happens much earlier than that for higher elevation).

Thankfully that Younger Dryas episode, whatever caused it, we still don't fully understand it...subsided, CO2 levels rose back up with the warming temps to the Holocene optimum levels, that led to favorable conditions for civilization to flourish and for agriculture to take off.

We're still in an ice age, and we'll return to a glacial period once again, because volcanoes are ultimately in control of that process. We got a preview of that in 1816, the famous "year without a summer". Our job as humans is to adapt to whatever nature throws at us.

[1] https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&r... [2] https://techthoroughfare.com/earth/laschamps-excursion-mass-... [3] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/historictemperat... [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

> We know it was close to 7000 ppm during the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. We know it was in the thousands of ppm for most of life's existence on this planet.

I'm really unclear on the point here. A rapid transition to the climate of the Cambrian period would annihilate most civilization - The globe was entirely free of ice at the end of the Cambrian and temperatures were 7 degrees celsius higher than today.

While it's plausible for humans to adapt to significantly colder temperatures, it's difficult for Human's to adapt to higher temperatures in a short period. There are limits to what A/C systems can handle, and I'd doubt that people would enjoy required bathing times per day for temperature reasons.

By your own words, those events triggered mass extinctions. Like you, I think the most probable outcome is that climate change results in a mass extinction event. And like you, I think humans will survive in some form, albeit at significantly reduced levels. If that provides you comfort, then have at it. But I personally consider that outcome to be an epic failure on our part. Especially considering we have the knowledge and the technology to prevent this.

And if you think our geological history provides the answers to what our future with climate change will look like, I implore you to get familiar with the anthropic principle[1]. We have never significantly altered our atmosphere this fast before, there is no precedent. And using our geological past as a dataset is inherently flawed. In order for us to observe that data, we necessarily would have had to survive/emerge from that history. How many other planets had similar geological records but then took a different turn? If you can show me that data, I will re-consider you anti-fragile position.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Solar input is higher than hundreds million years ago, and for tens of million years there've been several extinction events above 900 ppm. Extinctions happens fast and wipes out alot of life. Researchers find CO2 to often be catalyst.

Humans are adapted to Holocene, so it seems best to not poke the bear. However, 100 years of pollution need to be undone for that.

Don't you think that the scientists who literally dedicate their life to understanding the climate are aware of the difficulties and have developed methods to get useful predictions out of ensembles of models? The predictions used for example in the IPCC reports get their error bars at least in part from the disagreement of the different models.

Regarding sea ice: I think a temporary increase is not unexpected. As ice melts the salinity of the ocean goes down, which makes it freeze a bit easier.

> Wheat yields are doing fine

Your source to support that claim provides 1 year of historical data. The article of this discussion says that since the 1960s, total U.S. agricultural production has dropped by 1/5th due to climate change, negating 7 years of improved yields. Due to increased temperatures and decreased moisture, this will lead to greater diminishment of yields, and it’s possible that agricultural innovation will be unable to keep up.

The source you linked shows "Spring Wheat" at it's lowest projected production since 2012, which is how far back this goes. Winter wheat was obviously not affected by the heatwave, because it was already harvested by then.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/swmap.... shows that yields per state vary, but anywhere from 22% down in ID to 46.8%.

The spring wheat crops are doing very poorly, and is very alarming.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/awprod...

Here's the production charts. We had 1.83 billion bushels last year and 1.75 billion this year.

Its only Spring Wheat which was affected but Winter Wheat is at all time highs. See this chart, for example:

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/swyld....

2021 is anamolously bad for spring wheat. 2018 through 2020 were record high years for spring wheat on the contrary. Trend for yield is up and to the right. Weather disasters happen, like the droughts we had in the 1930s that caused the Dust Bowl. At any rate, don't forget to zoom out.

The scary thing is that even if we stopped carbon emissions today, the world would keep getting hotter for many years, even if don't trigger any more of the climate tipping points.

Yup. There is pretty much nothing we can do to stop a global catastrophe at this point.

The choice now is between small global catastrophe or large global catastrophe.

Time to plant trees

While being careful not to change the albedo too much, or you make things worse.

For ongoing monitoring various US crops over the growing season,

https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/cj82k7...

Weekly weather and crop bulletin from the USDA.

For continual improvement over time in US corn yield, see

https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...

For continual improvement over time in US soybean yield, see

https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/what-s-really-driving-h...

For current and forecasted global ag production, see

http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca8861en

OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2020-2029

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/world-agricultural-production

Reading Gizmodo for ag is like reading AgWeb for the latest zero-day. It might be fine (the Gizmodo content on this year’s wheat crop mirrors the USDA reports cited above) but there are other sources for which it is their full time job.

For global ag, you might want to start with USDA or FAO for a fuller picture before putting a lot of faith on a single study saying anything definitive about global ag, especially purporting 20% differences over the entirety of world agricultural production.

The linked slideshow of satellite images between last year and this year is slightly alarming [0]

[0] https://gizmodo.com/7-shocking-satellite-images-reveal-the-w...

Can anyone find out how much grain the USA stockpiles?

I tried to find out for the EU, but I can't find that either. (The stockpiles/overproduction was one of the favourite criticisms of anti-EU people in Britain.)

Living in Western Kansas and working for a large family farm right now.

Most of the farmers around here use the long tube grain storage (1) and store it right on the edge of their fields. Lots of grain stored here across the countryside that probably isn't recorded anywhere.

1. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/agricultural-plastic-...

All this worrying will help, for sure. Let me know when the next ice age doom and gloom hits the newsroom.

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