re, 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 likely to respond to a community’s calls for increased wages or sustainable waste management, Jackson says, because the farm and its operators live and work within the community.
“Our consumption matters in that we make a choice on the kind of food system we want — large, centralized and vulnerable or decentralized, resilient and supportive of our values?” Jackson says. “By keeping food local and regional, we, as consumers and citizens, can create the food system we want, that responds to our values and beliefs — be they environmental, economic, social or all of the above.”
This isn’t to say that consumers should not support a national food system. Lengnick adds that the issue is more complex than simply buying local products and that consumers should try to strike a balance. “Farmers in California are hurting from the impacts of this drought,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to say stop buying California products because that’s the system we’re in and those farmers are depending on sales.”
But Lengnick says she believes consumers can drive a transition to more a resilient food system by using their own dollars to develop regional food systems and by advocating with politicians and the government to make policy changes that support those systems.
“A resilient U.S. food system would be made up of strong, diverse, local and regional agricultural economies,” Lengnick says. “There are some good ideas in resilience science for how to transform the system, but they’re mostly theories. I would say we want to proceed carefully, but we need to start working now to start transforming our system to be more resilient to climate risk.”
Lengnick adds that federal farm subsidies could be restructured to support small-scale, sustainable agriculture instead of industrial production of specific crops. In her book, she suggests this could include accounting for income and ability when distributing financial support so as to give more aid to new and developing farmers instead of encouraging the expansion of large, investor-owned agricultura