Climate Change Threatens to Unbuckle U.S. Corn Belt — Study

by Daniel Cusick (Politico Pro) Even under moderate-emission scenarios, the Corn Belt of the Upper Midwest will become "unsuitable to the cultivation of corn by 2100," research shows.

The U.S. Corn Belt may no longer grow its namesake commodity by century's end unless farmers take a more sustainable approach to farming — including by shifting away from mono-cropping practices that have been a mainstay of American agriculture for more than a century.

That’s the core finding of new research from Emory University. The study, published this month in Environmental Research Letters, says that “significant agricultural adaptation will be necessary and inevitable” to maintain farm economies across millions of acres of the agricultural heartland.

“Climate change is happening, and it will continue to shift U.S. cultivation geographies strongly north," Emily Burchfield, the study’s author and an assistant professor of environmental sciences at Emory, said in a release.

"It's not enough to simply depend on technological innovations to save the day. Now is the time to envision big shifts in what and how we grow our food to create more sustainable and resilient forms of agriculture," she added. READ MORE

Excerpt from Environmental Research Letters: Climate change is projected to transform agricultural systems around the globe. Though climate strongly influences where and how farmers cultivate, millennia of agricultural innovation have expanded cultivation geographies far beyond what sun, soil, and water alone can support. Evaluating how climate interacts with human activity to shape cultivation possibilities for farmers is vital to understanding the impacts of climate change on agriculture. I assess how climate interacts with agricultural activity to shape the cultivation geographies of six major crops: corn, soy, wheat, cotton, hay and alfalfa. For each crop, I model biophysical suitability, or the probability of a crop's occurrence given only biophysical conditions, and agricultural suitability, or the probability of a crops occurrence given biophysical conditions as well as agricultural inputs, farm resources, and farm(er) characteristics. Though biophysical conditions strongly shape cultivation geographies, agricultural activity—particularly the use of crop insurance and agricultural inputs—amplifies and expands the cultivation geographies of these major crops, often into regions biophysically unsuited to their cultivation. I project biophysically driven shifts in cultivation geographies to 2100 under low, moderate, and high emissions scenarios and find that these geographies will shift strongly north, with the Corn Belt becoming unsuitable to the cultivation of corn by 2100. These results indicate that significant agricultural adaptation will be necessary and inevitable in the Central and Eastern U.S. READ MORE