“Upon closer inspection, recent temperature trends strongly suggest that Saskatchewan is not getting much hotter, but rather ‘less cold’: there has been a larger increase in daily minimum temperatures (as opposed to maximum) and the largest warming has occurred during winter and early spring, resulting in a longer frost-free period and more growing degree days.”
Well, if that is climate change, bring it on. The thought of warmer winters and a longer growing season should bring joy to the heart of every Canadian farmer. If only it were that simple.
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The silver lining in SaskAdapt’s hopeful summary in the italics has a very dark other side. According to the new web initiative of the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative (PARC) at the University of Regina, even though that longer, warmer season may provide opportunity for increased moisture, “effectively, what is happening is that increased evapotranspiration, driven by warmer overall temperatures, overwhelms the effect of increased precipitation…”
In simple terms, we get drier.
That might be news to all those farmers in southeast Saskatchewan and Manitoba who got flooded out this spring, and also to those who got flooded last year. But the historical and forecasted climate data on the site is easily accessed, summarized and evaluated. And it’s pretty convincing.
It’s also a warning to all of us, wherever we are in the country, and whether we think climate change is going on balance to do more good for us than harm. Every change seems to bring bad with the good.
The eastern Prairies are Canada’s epicentre for learning this hard lesson. Saskatchewan farmers have a long memory of drought and how to farm with it. They don’t know flood.
It’s the same in other parts of the country where farmers find themselves grappling with conditions that they’ve never had to prepare for. Who in the northern Peace River district of Alberta would have bargained on drought?
The Saskatchewan numbers are startling. For example, precipitation was 70 per cent above average in southern Saskatchewan last year, at the same time that it was 20 per cent below normal for the north.
Since 1990, flood and drought have been the two most frequent events, floods being short term and droughts dragging out longer. Add to that, fires, storms, hail, extremes of heat and cold, winter storms and tornadoes. Yup, that’s Canadian weather. No wonder we talk about it. All the time.
The point is, we get a lot of weather and, like any change or event, its impact needs to be incorporated into farm production and business plans. Now, the people at PARC suggest you actually get started, beginning with an assessment of the impacts of climate variability on your specific operation.
Saskatchewan is taking an early lead. PARC research has been used to develop a self-assessment tool on the SaskAdapt website ( www.parc.ca/saskadapt). This assessment is for use by all sectors in Saskatchewan that might be vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including agriculture, tourism, forestry, and energy.
“Our client is everybody in the province right now,” says John Vandall, a consultant with PARC who helped to develop and update the website over the past year.
“We set up the tool to be a where-do-you- start kind of thing,” Vandall says. Then they test drove it with a farmer to see how it would be used and where it could be improved.
The tool is based on helping farmers understand historical and projected future climate data. It is then left largely up to individual producers to determine where their farming operation might be vulnerable to climate change, what impact the change or event might have, and how best to mitigate or take advantage of that impact.
The goal, says Vandall, is to put farmers in a position to ask what changes they need to make to be more resilient if weather events get more frequent and more severe.
For example, if Saskatchewan is becoming become drier and warmer with more variable weather and more frequent and intense weather events, what does that mean for farming? According to the website, yields on traditional crops are expected to decrease on average, with large losses in some years due to drought or excessive moisture. As well, climatic changes could lead to new weeds, new pests and new cattle diseases.
As Vandall puts it, “We’re living that right now.” But don’t forget, not all climate change is negative, even for the Prairies. Grain producers may need to get concrete information about the impact of a longer season which starts earlier and has an overall increase in heat units. Maybe they should be researching different crop rota- tions. Pulse crops have already been adopted in the south. Maybe corn, soybeans and sorghum might be in our future. And livestock producers could see improved feed efficiencies if winters aren’t as severely cold.
So what other adaptations might farmers make? The website provides a list for both grain and livestock producers, including everything from cover crops, the Permanent Cover Program, grazing plans, water well management and integrated pest management to a switch to even more winter crops and zero-till management.
But weather is a complicated business. South of Regina this summer, a number of producers used huge double discs to work down all the dead weed growth from this year’s flood in an attempt to get the soil into some kind of shape for next season. These are farmers who have used zero-till technology for years, so it’s an odd kind of dilemma for people programmed to incorporate soil conservation techniques that revolve around drought. Their response illustrates how flexible and uniquely skilled farmers actually are.
Beyond changing production decisions, there are psychological shifts necessary to respond to changing conditions. And farmers invariably make them. Many years ago, blackened summerfallow and squeaky-clean wheat fields made a farmer’s chest swell with pride. It’s been a pretty big leap for producers to burn off, leave the trash and grow a relatively “dirty” field of lentils. But they’ve made that leap. And now for the most part, summerfallow is regarded with skepticism, and this has nothing to do with whether producers believe in climate change or not.
Norm Henderson would agree. He’s director of PARC and holds a PhD in environmental science. To address the skeptics, his organization mostly refers to “climate variability” because people have been experiencing that first hand.
“To our knowledge, it’s no different in the agriculture sector than in any other part of society,” Henderson says. “There are those who believe in it (climate change) and others who don’t,” Henderson says. “We pursue our scientific work and can’t worry about, or be influenced by whether people believe it or not. We have to focus on the science.”
That’s a challenge in agriculture, Henderson says. “The effects (of climate change) are harder to see on agricultural land than in forest where natural vegetation change can be seen over the span of decades.”
Henderson admits the group has received little feedback from producers, but the tool has only been available in its updated form for a short period. What he does understand is that “it’s not realistic to expect people to work on it without some expert to go through it with them.” To that end he’d like to see workshops or clinics run across the province using the tool to help producers determine best management practices around climate change, and perhaps to work this into use with the Environmental Farm Plan initiative.
What people have found very useful, he says, are the climate models, which reflect data in the past for up to 600 years. By reconstructing evidence using tree rings, layered pollen, lake sediment and sand dune deposits, the research came up with “some pretty reliable timelines and what we’ve found, leaving aside human-induced changes, is an even greater variability in the 1700s when it was much drier.”
The historical research raises troubling questions today, Henderson says. “How would we have managed a 30-year drought? We can see these events are quite possible in this region.”CG
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Bringing Climate Science To The Farm
Increased moisture over the past few years has forced saskatchewan’s norm hall to drop lentils from his crop rotation. It has wreaked havoc with his peas, and is having a growing effect on his barley. “I can see what’s happening here on my own farm,” Hall says of the weather. “It’s not necessarily warming, but it is changing.”
Norm Hall took the challenge, volunteering to be one of the first producers to use the SaskAdapt Self-Assessment Tool, designed to “help individuals, farmers, ranchers, small businessmen and communities in Saskatchewan evaluate decisions about adapting to climate change.”
That makes him among the first in Canada to get scientific about how to manage his farm through coming climatic uncertainties.
Farming 4,500 acres near Wynyard, Hall is a board member with Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan. He chairs their environment committee and has taken part in Agri-Foresight workshops delivered through Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Hall has farmed for 32 years up against the Quill Lakes and says, tongue in cheek, “this year 1,600 acres went back to the environment.” Unprecedented precipitation of has grown the lake and swallowed up land that had been lowland prairie and scrub brush for 75 years.
“We need to find ways to mitigate the effects (of climate change),” Hall says. “I found the two sets of climate data the website had for the Wynyard area fascinating… it was well thought out. It needed some tweaking, but the overall concept is good. If I hadn’t had the knowledge I already had it sure would have opened my eyes.”
Hall believes that because every area experiences different weather, it’s impossible to have blanket solutions. Still many farmers may use the same tools, including insurance and government programs, and production options such as crop rotations.
The web tool at www.parc.ca/saskadapt is broken down into five areas:
Taking Stock — How does current weather or climate affect me? This section probes how climate affects your farm, and what adjustments you may already be making to respond to changing weather.
Future Climate of Interest — How will future climate impact your business or activity? Climate models from PARC help farmers answer predict possible extreme events and the impacts of future global climate scenarios.
What are the Key Opportunities or Threats? — Here, farmers are helped to identify potential opportunities and risks associated with climate change, whether they are manageable, and what priority should be placed on them.
Adaptation Options — What Should You Do? Perhaps the hardest question of all is, what does success look like? This section is a resource for responding to opportunities created by climate change, which risks should be addressed immediately, what adaptations could be made to address risk, and what are the costs and benefits of adapting.
Taking Action — Of course nothing changes without action and this section challenges users to decide what needs to happen, who should be involved, who might act as a resource, what information you might need, and how a plan would be evaluated.
Even with the website, climate-based management will be complex, Hall believes. To prove how complex, he cites just one example.
Direct seeding, a practice brought about to ensure soil conservation through the dry years, has backfired of late, Hall says. “This year it’s been our bane. The trash collected snow and kept the ground wet. The land was mud underneath. I suppose it helped us with getting over the land the first time because the trash was like the skin on pudding, but underneath was the pudding.”
