By Marie Johnson

Surviving the Swelter: Adapting Agribusiness to a Changing Climate

By Marie Johnson Graphics courtesy of First Street Foundation

It isn’t alarmist to sound an alarm in response to a genuine problem.

This past summer, Alabama stewed in successive heatwaves, prompting the National Weather Service to repeatedly issue heat advisories to warn people of the hazards posed by the stifling summer temperatures.

The ‘heat index’ - the combination of ambient temperature and humidity - repeatedly breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Worse, climatologists report that these conditions are likely to grow more severe, and affect the state for longer each year.

The First Street Foundation released a peer-reviewed report indicating that areas experiencing “extreme dangerous” heat - defined by the National Weather Service as a heat index over 125 degrees - will grow drastically over the next thirty years. Indeed, projections outline a wide swath of the Continental United States, from Texas and the Gulf States sweeping up as far north as the Great Lakes, forming a kind of “extreme heat belt.”

By 2053, more than 100 million Americans would be directly affected by extreme heat conditions in this area. But the impact on agriculture could prove even more devastating, with food security across the country at risk.

The Huntsville Business Journal spoke with Dr. Josh Clevenger, a plant geneticist at the agricultural and bioscience concern, HudsonAlpha, about the challenges that climate change poses to agribusiness, and possible solutions to them.

These issues can include the exacerbation of crop infestations, such as the Aspergillus fungus, which can produce a dangerous neurotoxin under drought conditions. Farmers may have to adjust when they plant their crops to compensate for scorchinghot summers, perhaps even planting in the winter so that the crops can be harvested before truly intense heat or drought strikes.

Attaining sufficient water for agricultural needs has always been a high priority for farmers, whose operating margins are notoriously tight.

Dr. Clevenger also mentioned Bridgeforth Farms as a particular in-

novator in the field of agriculture. As profiled before in the Huntsville Business Journal, Bridgeforth Farms is a national leader in the adoption of new technologies to make farming more efficient. The combination of high-tech computerized soil monitors with buried drip-irrigation systems allow Bridgeforth Farms to react rapidly to changing weather and soil conditions, and to do so with the precise amount of water necessary.

The ability to innovate and rapidly adapt is what will enable farms and other agribusinesses to survive these changing conditions. “Just because temperatures change, that doesn’t mean that every year is the same,” said Dr. Clevenger. “For peanut growing, 2019 was a really bad year for aflatoxin, while last year was the best peanut yield in the Southeast that anyone could remember, because the conditions were just right.”

Sequencing DNA to isolate useful properties in certain plant breeds can enable the isolation and swift integration of those traits into crop populations. “Diversity is the name of the game, providing our growers with a wide array of different plants that they need to sustain us.”

“It’s not irrational to be concerned,” said Dr. Clevenger. “I will say that, as someone who is relatively young in the field of science, the difference in what we can do now versus what we could do even just back in 2013 is pretty incredible. We can find natural variation in plant species, and instead of cross-pollination, we can go through thousands and thousands of lines of DNA, rapidly, and introduce those traits…Being concerned is good, as innovation requires dollars, but it may not be common knowledge that we have this huge network of USDA scientists that are doing just great work, across the country, to address these problems.“

The challenges are real, and not just for the agricultural industry. But our capacity to meet these challenges has never been greater. The alarm is rung, but that isn’t the signal to panic, or to give in to despair. It’s the signal to get to work to solve the problem, and with the genetic expertise of labs like HudsonAlpha and the practical innovation of businesses like Bridgeforth Farms, North Alabama can set a strong example for the rest of the nation to follow in the days to come. w