Adapting farming to climate change

Added 2 months ago

We know Kiwi farmers are wary of advice coming from overseas, but here’s an intelligent interview with the director of the Purdue University Climate Change Research Center, located in America’s farming heartland. The Q&As nicely raise the issues that all farmers need to be addressing.

Here’s one especially pertinent observation …

“I think good forms of adaptation for climate change in North American regions require thinking about how to get maximum yields while growing cover crops and abandoning the concept of tillage. The farmers who are capable of keeping a live plant on the ground for the majority of the growing season are going to do their future selves a lot of good by retaining the soils that they have. The soils will be better able to hold onto moisture, better able to let moisture infiltrate. Those wetter springs are going to be less consequential, and the soils will hold more water into the growing season and fall. The abundance of soil fauna, earthworms and other things that will be growing there, will create a soil structure that's going to be super helpful to farmers going forward.”