What were once green and lush lands have now turned into dry and dead fields. Orchards that have been passed down to farmers from generation to generation are being torn down because there is not enough water to keep them alive. Lakes, rivers and streams have shriveled away to cracked ground, shattered like broken glass.
This is the grim reality that California faces entering its fourth year of an extreme drought. In January 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency that included mandatory water usage reductions, some of which will remain in effect until at least May 2016. According to an economic analysis by an economist at the University of California Davis, the state’s 564,000 inactive acres of farmland will cause farm revenue losses of around $1.8 billion and economywide revenue losses of around $2.7 billion.
But what does a drought in California have to do with Western North Carolina? With California providing two-thirds of the nation’s produce and 80 percent of the world’s almonds, the drought has the potential to increase retail food prices throughout the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Local experts say the situation also holds lessons for food systems in WNC.
“California is a good cautionary tale of what happens when we concentrate a lot of agriculture in a small place on extremely large farms,” says Charlie Jackson, executive director of Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. “The lesson of California is that a big centralized place where we’re growing most of the food for most of the country is extremely vulnerable and leaves us all very vulnerable.”
According to Marjorie McGuirk, founder of climate and weather consulting firm CASE Consultants International, much of the nation’s food production used to be in the Southeast. McGuirk explains that subsidies for irrigation, fewer native insect pests and improvements in irrigation techniques led to the shift from a distributed agricultural system to much of the nation’s agriculture being concentrated in the west.
The consequence of that change is an agricultural system where weather disruptions such as drought impact the entire national foodshed, says Laura Lengnick, a local author and former Warren Wilson College professor who works with the climate resilience consulting firm Fernleaf Solutions.
“When you have so much concentrated production in one area, you open yourself up to disturbances,” Lengnick explains. “It’s not a resilient system because if something happens in that one area, the entire U.S. food supply is affected.”
In addition to the more immediate impact at the grocery store, the drought in California may also be a harbinger of more food system disruptions. According to Lengnick, who recently wrote Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate, this isn’t the last time we should expect to see climate change have an impact on national agriculture or local food production in WNC.
“[As] in most places in the country, climate change in this area is bringing more variable weather, such as warmer winters and more frequent and warmer heat waves and cold waves,” she notes. “The nights are getting hotter and interfering with fertilization of fruits like green peppers and tomatoes and squash, especially in the squash family. If nights are too hot, they stop producing female flowers and start producing male flowers, and male flowers won’t give you any fruit.”
McGuirk agrees, saying data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is also showing changes in WNC’s temperatures.
“One of the stronger signals of climate change in WNC is nighttime temperatures,” she explains. “It’s not so much that we are warming up — though we are — it’s more that we’re not cooling off at night. The minimum temperatures are rising.”
While McGuirk notes that the different in high and low temperatures is slight, she adds that it doesn’t take much temperature change to begin to notice the effects. Rainfall has also changed — not so much in amount, but in severity. “It’s raining about as much as befo