Agricultural News
Southern Plains Perspective Blog Post: Dry Times... Are We Getting Ready?
Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:06:31 CDT
There is a new blog post out on the Southern Plains Perspective by Clay Pope. In this post, Pope writes about mitigating drought conditions in times of undesireable weather events. Below is a sneak peek of the latest post:
In my job, I monitor many news websites and social media feeds. As I have mentioned before in previous postings, you never know what kind of information you will come across, and I might add how stories will interconnect.
For example, I have seen many stories lately about extreme weather events.—First, was a story I came across in the High Plains Journal titled “Kansas Governor declares drought emergency, warnings and watches for Kansas counties.” This story outlined the action taken by Governor Laura Kelly in response to the deepening drought including placing all 105 Kansas counties either in drought watch, warning or emergency status. This was closely followed by a press release from the media office of the Governor of the State of Texas declaring “Governor Abbott Issues Drought Disaster Declaration in July 2022” outlining his response to the worsening drought south of the Red River. And finally there was a piece on the Kansas Farmer website talking about with the headline “Drought tolerant wheat trait clears one more hurdle in United States” outlining how a new strain of wheat with traits designed to better handle dry conditions has cleared yet another regulatory hurdle on the way to final release for planting.
What all this says to me is that the horn we have been blowing on for over 20 years now—that we need to put a hard focus on “hardening” production agriculture to the extreme weather events that our changing climate is exacerbating—is sounding out notes as true as they have ever been. Extreme weather IS the new norm. It just is. The crazy weather we have always had in the southern great plains really has been shot full of steroids. WE MUST GET READY AS BEST WE CAN FOR WHAT LIES AHEAD!!
I have to admit it did my heart some good to see that some of the state governments in the region are jumping into action to try and help their communities deal with this drought. I also am always excited when a research effort results in a new tool that can help farmers and ranchers better deal with weather extremes. The work of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, our land grant universities and private industry and foundations is absolutely vital if we are going to be able to feed and clothe over 9 billion people by the middle of the century, especially in light of the challenges that climate change exacerbated extreme weather will bring to the table.
Breakthroughs like the newly developed drought tolerant wheat trait (called HB4) hold the promise of providing the tools necessary to adapt to our changing climate. I know many folks will read this and counter with ‘why focus on adaptation? Shouldn’t we instead be trying to roll climate change back?’ I would respond that of course we should do all we can to help stop our impact on the climate, but at the same time we have to realize that some of the ‘triggers’ on the climate have already been tripped and no matter how hard we dive into rolling things back, we still are going to be dealing with the impact of these changes for a long, long time.
To read the full blog post, click here.
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