Field and Garden: Improving climate resilience on farms, ranches

“My students have accepted the fact that our climate is being affected by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said the university instructor. “They want to know what we’re going to do about it.”

The comment was made during a leadership meeting that I recently attended of the North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.

Earlier in the morning attendees had been asked to list some of the climate-related factors that are negatively affecting agricultural production in America’s heartland.

The answers included: extreme weather events, warm nights, intense storms, prolonged dry spells, and new diseases and insects.

One person mentioned that although the growing seasons are becoming longer, wet springs have frequently delayed planting or even prevented planting of some fields.

“The weather is unpredictable,” said one attendee, “and that is adding to stress among farmers.”

Some readers may say that erratic weather is nothing new to farmers in the Midwest. Others may acknowledge changing climate patterns while remaining skeptical about the cause.

Regardless of your conviction about the weather-related challenges that farmers are facing, the students are still asking the right question: what are we going to do about those challenges?

The answer to the question is that we must adapt our management practices so as to build climate resilience on farms and ranches.

Resilience is the ability to cope with a damaging disturbance or shock. A resilient agricultural operation experiences less damage and recovers more quickly after an extreme weather event than conventionally managed farms and ranches.

The good news is that many of the best strategies for addressing climate risk are already familiar to farmers and ranchers. The strategies include diversifying the operation, improving soil health, integrating crops and livestock and reducing the use of off-farm inputs.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend SARE’s publication “Cultivating Climate Resilience on Farms and Ranches.” The publication can be found on SARE’s website: http://www.sare.org. If you’d rather receive a copy of the publication by mail, please contact me in the Extension office (652-2581).

SARE is a USDA-funded program that offers grants and educational opportunities to farmers, ranchers, researchers and educators to advance sustainable innovations in agriculture.

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Foster County will be well represented at the North Dakota State Fair this week. Our young people have entered eight swine, three sheep, five goats, three dairy and ten beef in the 4-H livestock show.

One 4-H’er has five entries in the rabbit show, and 56 4-H’ers will be exhibiting 154 static projects.

If you will be at the fair on Friday, I encourage you to check-out the North Dakota Public Leaders 4-H Showmanship Contest in the All Seasons Arena.

In this event, 4-H’ers who won champion or reserve champion showman earlier in the week will be paired with a public leader from our state. The youths will provide their leaders tips on how to show a specific species of livestock and then serve as the judges for the leaders’ efforts.

The contest begins at 5 p.m. on July 28.