{"id":41761,"date":"2018-12-18T07:15:46","date_gmt":"2018-12-18T12:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41761"},"modified":"2018-12-18T07:15:59","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T12:15:59","slug":"41761","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41761","title":{"rendered":"Where No Corn Has Grown Before: Better Living Through Climate Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where No Corn Has Grown Before: Better Living Through Climate Change?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Phil Roeder | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The growing season used to be too short to grow corn in Alberta. That\u2019s no longer true, according to a front page story in the November 26 Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em>: \u201cWarming Climate Pushes Corn North.\u201d\u00a0 Thanks to climate change, a warming planet means longer growing seasons, making it practical for Canadian farmers to raise corn.\u00a0 In the little town of La Crete, Alberta (\u201croughly as far north as Juneau, Alaska\u201d) temperatures \u201care 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average annually than in 1950\u2026and the growing season is nearly two weeks longer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Journal\u00a0<\/em>continues:<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s corn acreage has climbed 20% over the past decade, while soybean acreage has roughly doubled\u2026\u00a0Before 2013, provinces such as Saskatchewan and Alberta grew no significant amounts of soybeans\u2026.\u00a0 Now soybeans cover 425,000 acres in those provinces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cToday, the U.S. corn belt is in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana,\u201d Cargill CEO David MacLennan said in a 2016 interview.\u00a0\u201cIn 50 years, it may be in Hudson Bay, Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for regions where corn has traditionally been grown, they\u2019re seeing bigger harvests.\u00a0 \u201cWarming has helped increase U.S. corn harvests, delivering more than one-quarter of the yield growth across Corn Belt states since 1981\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this is great news, right?\u00a0Yet there is a down side.\u00a0 To its credit, the Journal\u00a0<\/em>admits that bigger harvests\u00a0may be harder to sustain as temperatures increase further, and climate shifts already are working against yields in some corn-producing regions\u2026.\u00a0 Overall, climate change-driven heat, droughts and soil erosion will likely diminish\u00a0<\/em>U.S. agricultural production, according to the latest installment of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, issued Friday [Nov. 23]\u201d (my italics).<\/p>\n

At Jake Vermeer\u2019s farm southeast of Edmonton, Alberta, the growing season is now 17 days longer.\u00a0 However, warmer temperatures also bring \u201cunusually long dry spells and harsher storms\u201d which make farming \u201cmore uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where No Corn Has Grown Before: Better Living Through Climate Change? Photo Source Phil Roeder | CC BY 2.0 The growing season used to be too short to grow corn in Alberta. That\u2019s no longer true, according to a front page story in the November 26 Wall Street Journal: \u201cWarming Climate Pushes Corn North.\u201d\u00a0 Thanks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2648,103,18874,141,21328,5493,1912],"class_list":["post-41761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-anthropogenic-climate-change","tag-canada","tag-charles-pierson","tag-climate-change","tag-corn","tag-counterpunch","tag-food-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41761"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41763,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41761\/revisions\/41763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}