As forecasters warn that this year’s El Niño could become the strongest on record, concerns are growing about its effect on agriculture and food security.
The United States will not be hit nearly as hard as Central and South America, the Caribbean, and southern Africa, but severe weather could cause significant crop loss in some parts of the country.
As a researcher and writer who studies farmers’ responses to climate crisis, I have watched these heartbreaking events become all too common: flooded fields, missed planting windows, crops so drought-stressed they are not worth harvesting.
But some farms have weathered extremes such as this year’s super El Niño better than others, for one key reason. In the winter, when most other fields are bare, these farms still have something growing.
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Over the past 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of visiting some of the most resilient farms in the country: the ones that soak up heavy rains when their neighbors have several inches of standing water, the ones that get 80% of their average yields in years when they have seen just 40% of their average moisture.
Their secret is that they have gradually built up the carbon-rich organic matter in their soil, which allows the land to soak up and hold moisture like a sponge.
There’s a long list of practices farmers use to do this, but the absolutely critical thing is to keep roots in the ground all year round, which can be accomplished in one of two ways. Farmers can plant a soil-building cover crop in the offseason or they can grow perennial plants, which live for multiple years.
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The researchers Andrea Basche and Marcia DeLonge found that doing one of these two things increases space between soil particles by 8%, allowing water to move into and through the soil. This may not sound like much, but Basche and DeLonge found that it was enough to make 16% more water available to plants during drought.
It’s particularly important to have roots in the ground when heavy rains come, as forecasters predict could happen across the entire southern half of the US this winter. Cover crops can increase infiltration of these rainstorms by 35% and perennials by 59%: enough, in many cases, to absorb a heavy rain event of 1in per hour.
This is good for farms, obviously, but it can also reduce the risk of flooding downstream, making cover crops and perennials a powerful form of green infrastructure. If one third of Iowa’s cropland grew perennials or cover crops, Basche and DeLonge found, it would reduce water runoff and flood frequency by one-fifth in particularly wet years.
Many farmers understand this versatile risk management strategy and have found a host of creative ways to incorporate cover crops and perennials into their crop plans.
Some are planting fruit and nut trees in rows between their annual crops. Some are using berry bushes as hedgerows at the edge of their fields or experimenting with newly developed perennial grains. Some are grazing livestock on perennial pasture. And some are planting strips of native prairie in between rows of corn and soy, a practice that Iowa State University researchers have found reduces sediment loss by 95%.
Unfortunately, though, you won’t see many cover crops or perennials growing if you drive through the major farming regions of the country, because while they reduce farmers’ long-term risk of losing their crops, they often increase their short-term risk of losing income.
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That’s because our current US crop insurance system greatly incentivizes farmers to plant legacy commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Insurance for these common 20th century crops is generously subsidized, such that farmers can lose an entire harvest and still come out OK.
With elderberries or hazelnuts, however, farmers are largely on their own, left to the mercy of a Whole Farm Revenue Protection program that nearly everyone in the industry agrees is woefully inadequate. And of course, it takes many years for perennials to mature and produce food, during which time farmers need other sources of support to tide them over.
As the Super El Niño gains steam this fall, Congress is negotiating the details of the farm bill: a once-in-a-decade opportunity to invest in the resilience of our food system.
Tucked within the massive legislation are programs that support farmers who want to add cover crops and perennials, such as the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. So far, Senate Republicans have insisted on decreasing funding for these programs, and haven’t even entertained deeper reform to crop insurance, which is one reason among many that the bill hasn’t advanced.
But it’s not too late: maybe this Super El Niño will be the nudge we need to finally invest properly in the resilience of American farms.
