Tag Archives: food

climate change, water, and corn

Here are a couple stories on U.S. corn yields:

From the “Risky Business Project“:

Shifting agricultural patterns and crop yields, with likely gains for Northern farmers offset by losses in the Midwest and South.

  • As extreme heat spreads across the middle of the country by the end of the century, some states in the Southeast, lower Great Plains, and Midwest risk up to a 50% to 70% loss in average annual crop yields (corn, soy, cotton, and wheat), absent agricultural adaptation.

  • At the same time, warmer temperatures and carbon fertilization may improve agricultural productivity and crop yields in the upper Great Plains and other northern states.

  • Food systems are resilient at a national and global level, and agricultural producers have proven themselves extremely able to adapt to changing climate conditions. These shifts, however, still carry risks for the individual farming communities most vulnerable to projected climatic changes.

From Ceres:

  • 87% of irrigated U.S. corn is grown in regions with high or extremely high water stress, meaning there is limited additional water available for expansion of crop irrigation. The most vulnerable regions are in Nebraska, Kansas, California, Colorado and Texas.
  • 27% of rainfed corn is grown in regions with high or extremely high water stress, meaning that there is limited water available should climate change make irrigation necessary. The most vulnerable regions are in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.
  • Twelve ethanol refineries above the High Plains aquifer – with nearly $1.7 billion in annual corn ethanol production capacity – are sourcing corn in areas experiencing cumulative declines in groundwater levels. Six of these refineries are in regions of extreme water-level decline (between 50-150 feet).

To me, this sounds like a lot of today’s productive farmland may not stay that way due to a combination of higher temperatures and drought. Can we really open up enough farmland and/or increase yields in “Northern States” to make up the difference? I suppose maybe there are areas of Canada that could go from ice-covered to prime farmland, as long as they stay wet enough.

fish passage on the Mekong

According to NPR, Laos is building several dams on the Mekong and there’s an argument about whether the fish passage systems that have been designed will be effective:

“I’m confident that the mitigation measures we can employ here will allow fish to pass the barrier we’re going to create. From studies we’ve done, the impacts people are saying the project will cause, change in flow, quality, sediment distribution, fish food, none of those things are going to arise from this project.”

The risks the dolphins downstream face are real, Hawkins says, but he says that’s because of bad fishing practices, tourism and poor management. As for migratory fish that use the Hou Salong channel, Hawkins says, the fish passageways his company, Megafirst, are building around the site should take care of the problem…

“The effectiveness of such fish passage mechansims is quite OK, let’s say, quite well proven for European or North American rivers, where we have small number of species that are well known,” Meng says. “But in the Mekong, we don’t have five fish species which we have to take care of, we have 70, maybe even more, and we have no clue about them. So building something for them to migrate up and down with, that’s just guessing at the moment.”

Trandem of International River says fisheries experts estimate that at least 43 species of fish are likely to go extinct because of the impact of the dam, including the Mekong giant catfish, the world’s largest. Sedimentation — the silt the river carries downstream to Cambodia and Vietnam — is another problem. The Xayaburi will have major food security implications as well, Trandem says.

“By blocking sediment, we know that where there’s a lot of agricultural productivity and rice growing, these areas are going to suffer a lot because they’re no longer getting the same nutrients,” she says. “And so this will have a significant impact, especially in the Cambodian flood plains but also in Vietnam’s ‘rice bowl,’ which is really the center of rice production for region.”

This is all interesting to me because of the question of whether technology like fish ladders can mitigate our environmental impacts. Even if it can, I don’t doubt for a second that there is a lot of bad development going on that will impact the ecosystem regardless of what is done with fish passage.