Category: AGRICULTURE_CN2 Heat_CN PATA_Heat_And_Ramifications_2022_Related

As the American West grapples with another dangerous heat wave in the midst of a megadrought, official advisories rightly focus on short-term measures to keep people cool and hydrated.
Yet as record-breaking heat waves become more common in a warming world, they pose a longer term threat to human well-being. Excessive heat interferes with pollinator interactions with plants that produce about a third of the world’s food crops. Scientists are scrambling to understand the complex ways spiking temperatures are disrupting those relationships.

Roughly 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — mostly nitrous oxide and methane — can be traced to the nation’s agricultural sector.
A range of ‘climate-smart’ farming practices have the potential to lower that impact, and also help sequester carbon dioxide emitted by other parts of the economy. For example, planting cover crops in between plantings of cash crops can absorb CO2 into the soil, among other benefits. However, cover crops and other climate-smart practices aren’t yet the norm.

It’s late afternoon, and the farmhands are shaded by wide-brimmed sun hats as they work in an experimental wheat field in northern Mexico, preparing the wheat flowers to be cross-pollinated in a couple of days. For each pollination, both wheat parents have been selected by crop scientists for desirable traits such as fungus resistance, photosynthesis efficiency, and yield.

Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil – less than a teaspoonful – contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.

Inside dozens of bankers boxes, stacked high in a storage locker in New York City, Cynthia Rosenzweig has stashed the work of decades: Legal pads covered in blue-inked cursive with doodles in the margins, file folders marked “potato,” graph paper with notations of rainfall in Nebraska and Kansas.

New research looks at the way climate change will impact crop yields and foods rich in micronutrients like zinc, vitamin A, and iron, putting low- and middle-income countries at increased risk of malnutrition.

Making tractors burn with less pollution has long posed a trade-off: cleaner air, but less power to drag heavy equipment. Now manufacturers say they’re making strides to help close the gap. The latest entrant is a biomethane- and electric-powered tractor from the AUGA Group, a Lithuanian organic food company that represents European farm machinery manufacturers. The combination of biomethane and electricity allows to the tractor to run as long as 12 hours, the company said when it announced the development in late September.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, a members-only monthly newsletter from Civil Eats. To read the full issue, with exclusive reporting,…

One weekend in late June, I drove with friends to Yolo County, California, a rural area in the Sacramento Valley. It was the second day of a multiday heat wave, and temperatures approached the triple digits. The road shimmered. In the passenger seat, a friend, seven months pregnant, wondered aloud whether it was safe for her to be outside.

In early summer, a day laborer laying irrigation lines at a plant nursery just south of Portland, Ore., collapsed to the ground and died. His official cause of death was declared “heat related.”