he 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 before, but it rains in bursts — ‘when it rains it pours,’” she says, explaining that we’re seeing less of the steady day after day rainfall WNC is used to having and more heavy rainfall.
According to a report from N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources published in June, North Carolina may also experience the effects of a drought.
Lack of adequate rainfall and hot temperatures have pushed 20 N.C. counties in the central and western parts of the state into a moderate drought, and 51 other counties are abnormally dry — meaning they will be in a drought if dry conditions continue.
So how does a foodshed brace for the effects of climate change? Jackson says it may not be possible to predict the next instance of drought, flood or other extreme weather, but supporting a diverse local food network does create a more resilient system. Jackson explains that produce grown in many different places and different climates — where the plants are more adaptable because they are specific to that particular region — creates a system where “we’ll be stronger because we won’t have all our eggs in one basket.”
For WNC in particular, ASAP estimates that local farmers could produce as much as 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables the local community consumes, providing some protection from disruption caused by extreme weather in other parts of the country.
“Having farms in more diverse places, diverse climates, diverse sizes — that’s a resilience,” Jackson adds. “The work that we have been doing here in Western North Carolina is really happening all over the world, which is looking at having more diversity.”
According to Jackson, building resilience in agriculture has the cascading effect of building economic resilience as well. Consumers who support that network of local farms are also supporting local businesses and keeping more money in their own communities. It’s also often the case that those local farms tend to be smaller, independently operated and have direct ties to their consumers. A small local farm is more lik