THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF
AGRICULTURE Greenhouses protect plants from increasingly frequent severe rainfalls.
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ast, uninterrupted amounts of space are among the most striking characteristics of the drive out to the North Fork of Long Island. It is a stark contrast to the hundreds of buildings and roads of Hempstead. Out there it’s easy to understand how agriculture can be such an important part of Long Island’s history and economy. There are farm stands, vineyards and animal pastures everywhere you look. With 560 farms and 30,032 acres of farmland, Suffolk County has the fourth highest value of agriculture sales in New York, bringing in $225.6 million in 2017. The region also has 69 wineries, the most in the state. As a result of climate change, winters are becoming milder and shorter, and summers are growing longer and hotter. Additionally, severe rainfall events are becoming more common. Farmers and vineyards are forced to adapt to these changing conditions and find ways to protect the land for the future. Most Long Island agricultural operations are small, family-owned farms, including Sang Lee Farms Inc. The farm was started in the mid 1940s, after World War II, by the current owner’s father and uncles. This long history of farming in the area
By Annabel Hofmann
means that Lee’s family has witnessed changes in weather and storm patterns over the years. Lee explained that Long Island’s average last frost date is usually May 15, yet recently, the last frost has occurred much earlier. Additionally, farmers can harvest crops later into the fall, extending the growing season from previous years. While a longer growing season is ideal for crop production, Lee said there are also downsides to the warmer temperatures. “The middle of the summer when the temperature is higher than average and not entirely optimum for crop growth, we do see disease issues and fall off in the yield that we get with some crops,” he said. “It’s a double-edged sword.” Excessive heat is not good for vegetable plants, but it can increase the quality of wine that comes from the grapes that vineyards grow. This occurs “because wine grapes like heat, and they like sun and dry conditions,” said Richard Olsen-Harbich, the winemaker at Bedell Cellars. “I’ve been making wine here for 40 years. The varieties that we’re growing now get riper and make better wine than they used to, back 25 to 30 years ago.” Olsen-Harbich said vineyards are starting
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to plant grape varieties that thrive in the heat, which would have been harder 20 years ago. However, hotter temperatures also lead to an increase in yield from the grape plants, which decreases the quality of the wine produced from the grapes. “Quantity does not necessarily relate to quality,” Olsen-Harbich said. Additionally, grapes grown in hotter conditions can produce wine with a higher alcohol content, which people tend to avoid, Olsen-Harbich said. Robert Carpenter, administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, said that intense rain events are another effect of climate change that farmers are having to deal with. “So it used to be a three or four inch rainstorm was once every few years. A five-inch storm was maybe once a decade or once every 20 years. Now we’re seeing them with a little more frequency,” Carpenter explained. These intense rainfalls are detrimental to crop production, can make plants susceptible to diseases and force farmers to increase their fungicide usage, according to Sandra Menasha, vegetable and potato specialist for the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. “They’re just very intense, very destruc-
