SUMMARY: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning of a devastating global feedback loop around how humans produce and consume food. A new report urges immediate action on agricultural practices that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, which exacerbate climate change and, in turn, make soil less productive. William Brangham talks to the World Resources Institute's Janet Ranganathan.
SUMMARY: In addition to recovering and rebuilding after a brutal war with ISIS, Iraq is facing a dire water shortage. Levels in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have plummeted, in part because neighboring Turkey built a dam upstream that restricts the flow into Iraq. The remaining water is too salty to sustain life. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports on the crisis and its agricultural impact.
SUMMARY: In California's Salinas Valley, known as the "Salad Bowl of the World,” a push is underway to expand agriculture's adoption of technology. The mobile app HeavyConnect, for example, enables farm managers to track personnel and equipment efficiently. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports on how such innovation is providing new opportunities for the Valley's largely Hispanic population.
CAT WISE (NewsHour): As the sun rose over the fertile land of Salinas Valley, California, one recent morning, a group of farm workers waited to sign in for their shift, not on paper, as they normally do, but on an iPad, where an app has their name and job assignments already programmed in.
They are using HeavyConnect, a new mobile communication app designed to help farm managers keep better track of equipment and personnel. And the team that developed it were out bright and early to check in one of their newest customers, farm manager Sam Brigantino, who works for a large grower called Tanimura and Antle.
Co-founder Jessica Gonzalez walked him through a new update.
JESSICA GONZALEZ, HeavyConnect: You see the times they worked, and if they had any breaks and meals, it would be in between there. The jobs they did here, the legal statement.
SAM BRIGANTINO: Yeah, I like the pull-downs much better on this one.
JESSICA GONZALEZ: Basically, the functionality and flow is all the same. It's just an update to the U.I.
CAT WISE: An app's U.I., or User Interface, is not a typical topic of conversation on most farms. But scenes like this are becoming more common throughout Salinas.
That's because there's a effort under way by many in the community to make this valley a bit more like a certain high-tech valley to the north. A very visible sign of that effort is this new Silicon Valley-esque office space. It's an incubator for ag-focused startups that opened last December in downtown Salinas.
And it's where HeavyConnect and a number of other small companies are now coding away, hoping to break into the $50 billion-a-year fresh produce industry. And that's just in California.
PATRICK ZELAYA, HeavyConnect: We believe that, when it comes to ag-tech, if you can make it in the Salinas Valley, you're going to be able to have a product that will be adopted globally.
CAT WISE: HeavyConnect co-founder Patrick Zelaya is a former John Deere sales manager who has spent a lot of time with farmers. He says he started the company because he saw a big need for a product that would help farmers get back something they have very little of: time.
PATRICK ZELAYA: In large-scale farming, the job is a 14-hour-a-day six days a week. What's not commonly known is that farmers spend more time on the administration, managing the operation, than they do farming. So, HeavyConnect provides farmers the ability to know what's going on in their farm operationally without having to be there.
SUMMARY: Commercial beekeepers across America have been struggling with great numbers of bee deaths over the past few years. What’s behind their failing health? Some research points to a class of pesticide that’s coated onto a large proportion of corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. Allison Aubrey of NPR reports.
ALLISON AUBREY (NPR): It’s harvest time at Adee Honey Farms in Bruce, South Dakota. Bret Adee’s the third generation to manage the 80,000 hives the Adees have scattered across five Midwestern states. He says beekeeping these days is much harder than it’s ever been.
BRET ADEE, Adee Honey Farms: In 2010, our bees were just destroyed in a couple of weeks. Most of our bees died.
ALLISON AUBREY: Bret says things really haven’t improved much.
BRET ADEE: I would to see about twice to three times as many bees in most of the hives right now. It will be a real challenge to keep them alive through the winter.
ALLISON AUBREY: The Adees are not alone. According to a preliminary survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, commercial beekeepers lost 42 percent of their colonies last year. Bees are a critical part of agriculture.
Adee trucks his bees out to pollinate California’s almond groves every year. And it’s not just almonds. Bees pollinate everything from apples to cherries and squash. To figure out what’s plaguing the bees, the Obama administration assembled a task force last year. Scientists at the EPA, USDA and researchers across the country who have been studying the problem are finding there are multiple issues.
Bees have fewer wildflowers to forage on due to a loss of habitat. There’s viruses that pests pass on to the bees. Climate change is thought to play a role too. Another issue is pesticides. Some studies suggest that a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoid, or neonics for short, are harming the bees.
These pesticides are coated onto the seed of about 80 percent of the corn that’s grown in the United States and about half the soybeans too. To get a sense of that scale, imagine a cornfield like this taking up the entire state of California. That’s how much of this re-treated seed is being planted.
SUMMARY: The almond, America’s most popular nut and California's most lucrative agriculture export, is also a water guzzler. It takes approximately a gallon of water to grow a single almond. While prices are at record highs due to global demand, the Golden State is also in the middle of a historic drought, which is hurting farmers and residents. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): In California, Governor Jerry Brown called this week for ramping up fines for residents and businesses who waste water.
But in this fourth year of the drought, many are asking about the role of some agriculture and farming.
One of the chief targets is one of the state’s most popular exports. Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, went to see for himself. Part of our ongoing reporting “Making Sense” which airs every Thursday on the NewsHour.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): The almond. Revered in some cultures, reviled recently in ours.
Because of almonds, there’s no water.
JOHN AND KEN RADIO SHOW: The almond farmers are using more water than all the people in LA and San Francisco combined.
PAUL SOLMAN: The John and Ken Show, in Southern California, claims to be the country’s most listened to local talk radio program.
JOHN AND KEN RADIO SHOW: Half the almonds they’re shipping to China! And this is why we’re getting water meters and we’re getting lectured and scolded and we gotta take shorter showers and we can’t water our lawns. This is BS!
PAUL SOLMAN: It was Mother Jones magazine which first reported the stunning statistic: It takes over a gallon of water to grow just one almond.
The press has piled on since, portraying almonds as water wasters in the midst of near-epic drought. And it’s not just the almond, but every nut in the orchard.
SUMMARY: We report from Hawaii, where a battle has erupted in Kauai between residents concerned about public health and large companies developing genetically modified seeds.
MEGAN THOMPSON: The Hawaiian island of Kauai is known as the garden isle, luring hundreds of thousands of tourists to its lush northern shores. But fewer make it down to the drier southwest side, home to many native Hawaiians, who’ve lived here for generations…and where farming has always been a way of life.
Today these fields are home to large biotech companies developing Hawaii’s biggest agricultural product: seeds. Genetically modified (GMO) seeds, mostly corn, to be shipped back and grown on the mainland.
THIS summer the tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif., may once again grace the nation’s front pages. Situated in Death Valley, it last made news in 1913, when it set the record for the world’s hottest recorded temperature, at 134 degrees. With the heat wave currently blanketing the Western states, and given that the mercury there has already reached 130 degrees, the news media is awash in speculation that Furnace Creek could soon break its own mark.
Such speculation, though, misses the real concern posed by the heat wave, which covers an area larger than New England. The problem isn’t spiking temperatures, but a new reality in which long stretches of triple-digit days are common — threatening not only the lives of the millions of people who live there, but also a cornerstone of the American food supply.
People living outside the region seldom recognize its immense contribution to American agriculture: roughly 40 percent of the net farm income for the country normally comes from the 17 Western states; cattle and sheep production make up a significant part of that, as do salad greens, dry beans, onions, melons, hops, barley, wheat and citrus fruits. The current heat wave will undeniably diminish both the quality and quantity of these foods.
The most vulnerable crops are those that were already in flower and fruit when temperatures surged, from apricots and barley to wheat and zucchini. Idaho farmers have documented how their potato yields have been knocked back because their heat-stressed plants are not developing their normal number of tubers. Across much of the region, temperatures on the surface of food and forage crops hit 105 degrees, at least 10 degrees higher than the threshold for most temperate-zone crops.
What’s more, when food and forage crops, as well as livestock, have had to endure temperatures 10 to 20 degrees higher than the long-term averages, they require far more water than usual. The Western drought, which has persisted for the last few years, has already diminished both surface water and groundwater supplies and increased energy costs, because of all the water that has to be pumped in from elsewhere.
If these costs are passed on to consumers, we can again expect food prices, especially for beef and lamb, to rise, just as they did in 2012, the hottest year in American history. So extensive was last year’s drought that more than 1,500 counties — about half of all the counties in the country — were declared national drought disaster areas, and 90 percent of those were hit by heat waves as well.
The answer so far has been to help affected farmers with payouts from crop insurance plans. But while we can all sympathize with affected farmers, such assistance is merely a temporary response to a long-term problem.
Fortunately, there are dozens of time-tested strategies that our best farmers and ranchers have begun to use. The problem is that several agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any federal effort to promote them, including leaving them out of the current farm bill, or of climate change legislation at all.
SPENCER MICHELS(Newshour): This is the once-mighty San Joaquin River, and much of it has been like this, dry as toast, since the 1940s.
That's when the federal government constructed Friant Dam near Fresno, California, which impounded the San Joaquin's water in a large reservoir, so it could diverted through a vast network of canals to farms and ranches in the San Joaquin Valley, leaving some sections of the river wet, some dry.
Today, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. But the fish are gone, and the river is a ghost of its former self.
Now there is a controversial move afoot to cover this sand with water to restore this river. Before the dam, the water began high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and flowed west, through the Central Valley, and eventually out through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.
The survival of salmon that used to come up the river from the Pacific Ocean is a crucial reason for restoring the river.
Gerald Hatler works for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And, next, we resume our weeklong look at food security and how climate change is affecting what we produce and how we eat.
Tonight, special correspondent Sam Eaton reports from India on how farmers are turning to ancient seeds to keep their crops viable in the future.
It's part of our series “Food for 9 Billion,” in partnership with Public Radio International's "The World," Homelands Productions, American Public Media's Marketplace, and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
SAM EATON: On May 25, 2009, Cyclone Aila slammed into the Ganges River delta on the coast of Bangladesh and India. Hundreds of thousands fled as the storm surge tore through earthen embankments and flooded rice fields with a wall of seawater.
I traveled to Eastern India with ecologist Asish Ghosh to see how the more than four million people living in this vast river delta are adapting to the salty soils the storm left behind. It's been four years since the cyclone hit. And farmer Raj Krishna Das says growing enough food is still a struggle.
ASISH GHOSH, Director, Center for Environmental Development, Kolkata: So he even cannot have any vegetables growing after Aila because still -- still there is salt in the soil.
SAM EATON: This is what climate change looks like for the densely populated river deltas of the world. They hold some of the most productive farmland on the planet. But it's also some of the most threatened.
ASISH GHOSH: We have lost this amount of land on all sides of the island.
SAM EATON: Today, this delta coastline is retreating more than 600 feet a year, and the salt is encroaching even farther inland. As farmers here adapt to rising sea levels and more powerful storms, they become a case study for how to produce food on a warming planet.
SAM EATON: In even the remotest parts of India, the green revolution caused many farmers to abandon their traditional seeds for the modern high-yielding varieties promoted by the government. But for those who didn't, the benefits of these locally adapted seeds are becoming more and more pronounced; 64-year-old farmer Looknath Nauri grows 30 different traditional varieties of rice, millet, corn, squash and lentils on his two-acre plot in Eastern India.
His song is a celebration of the diversity of traditional seeds and the happiness it brings to his family and his land. These seeds, created over thousands of years, don't just have the genes to withstand droughts and floods. They're also adapted to local soils and pests, eliminating the need for costly nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. Some are so resilient, they sprout even in the dry months.
MAN: Look at this pearl millet. We cut it last December. There hasn't been any rain for five months. And it's sending up new shoots. This would never happen with a high-yielding variety. Once the rains come, we don't even have to reseed it. It just grows back by itself for two to three years.
SAM EATON: Nauri says he tried the new rice seeds, but his harvest didn't even come close to the traditional varieties.
Next week, NASA will show off some of its latest technology: a system for growing algae in floating plastic bags. The system is the result of a $10 million, two-year project that investigated whether the algae could be used to make biofuels, including jet fuel.
The system is designed to reduce the cost of making fuel from algae by making it possible to put algae farms near wastewater facilities, which offer a large source of nutrients.
But it may prove difficult to implement. For one thing, it will require a lot of plastic. In one possible setup, five square kilometers of plastic bags would be used to produce 2.4 million gallons of algae oil per year—a drop in the bucket compared to the 800 million gallons of oil the U.S. consumes every day. And the bags will likely need to be replaced every year.
The setup has been tested in four nine-meter-long plastic bags at a wastewater plant near San Francisco. The researchers demonstrated that they can grow enough algae to produce nearly 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year—if the weather cooperates. So if a commercial system gets built, it may need to be in someplace warmer and sunnier.
The lead researcher, Jonathan Trent, normally works on life-support systems for space travel. Those systems involve recycling human waste, and so does the algae fuel technology.
Trent plans to pump wastewater left over from treating sewage into bags made from common polyethylene. The wastewater is a good fertilizer, providing nutrients such as ammonia and phosphates. He also plans to pump carbon dioxide from power plants into the system to help algae grow. San Francisco produces enough wastewater to feed a floating algae farm that covers 1,200 acres, he says.
The setup is meant to solve some of the difficulties with making inexpensive fuels from algae. Algae need fertilizer to grow quickly, and wastewater is an excellent source of that. But large sources of wastewater—big cities—don't have the space needed for the artificial ponds that algae are typically grown in. Pumping the water to areas where land is cheap and plentiful is expensive and energy-intensive. Clear containers called photobioreactors might take up less space, but those, too, are expensive.
A few years ago, Trent wondered if floating plastic bags could serve as relatively cheap bioreactors. They don't need as much support as land-based ones—at least if they're floating on protected bays. And they solve another major problem with conventional bioreactors, which get too hot from sitting in the sun, and require expensive cooling systems as a result. In Trent's plastic bag system, the surrounding water helps keep the bags cool.
But while it may solve some problems—and it's far from clear that the bags will prove superior to ponds or other photobioreactors—the system creates others. Trent acknowledges, for example, that there will be an "enormous amount of plastic" to dispose of. The plastic could be recycled, although cleaning out the algae may be difficult. A better option may be reusing it, he suggests. For example, it could be used to replace the black plastic that many farmers in California cover their fields with to reduce weeds and evaporation.
The approach will face several other challenges. Working in corrosive saltwater environments is very difficult. And it's not clear how well the bags would survive storms.
If the bags break, the wastewater—which is normally released directly into the bay from treatment plants—wouldn't present a problem. And the algae they would use would die in the saltwater, so there's little threat to the bay ecosystem, Trent says. But it's hard to predict how expensive it would be to replace bags damaged by storms or infected with competing microbes.
The researchers also don't know how much the system will cost at a large scale. This month, they started a detailed economic analysis based on their results so far. The project also received $800,000 from the California Energy Commission.
The next decade will be a hot one, according to scientists unveiling the first 10-year projection of global warming.
The climate projection, published today in the journal Science, suggests that a natural cooling trend in eastern and southern Pacific ocean waters has kept a lid on warming in recent years.
And it will continue to do so, scientists say, but not for long.
The projection spans 2006 to 2015. "At least half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record," the researchers say in their report.
Globally, that means a typical year will be about half a degree warmer than in the previous 10 years, a projection in line with findings this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel's report, the work of thousands of scientists, also predicts steadily rising temperatures.
The creators of older climate models are most confident about their projections for the years around 2040, making a new decade projection especially important to politicians and other decision-makers, agrees Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "If this works, it is a good step forward," he says, but cautions that ocean temperature measurements vital to the decadal model are limited. Such measures are now fairly low tech, usually involving boats and thermometers.
Improved ocean measurements should soon improve the reliability of the decadal forecast, Smith says. And he adds one caveat the model can't account for. "Any major volcanic eruptions would cool the climate compared with our forecast."
Climate models have critics, such as renowned Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. But the Hadley Center projections have been run backwards, so-called "hindcasts" that closely reproduce climate in past decades to check accuracy.
