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‘It’s too fast, too big’: speed of climate crisis is devastating crops, say farmers | Drought and extreme heat are killing plants, driving up prices while also making some farms economically unviable (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] 13 points 3 months ago (11 children)

Not only farmers. Consumers as well. Farmers can only grow those crops for which there exists a buyer. In many areas, even in farm dense Europe, you can physically only sell like 3-6 crops in bulk. Now a farmer can sell directly to consumers but then that farmer runs a shop business next to his farming business and that's not realistic for everyone. Especially if you grow over a thousand tonnes of a certain grain.

It may well be that, for example, sorghum or millet is a much better climate adapted crop to a certain region than bread wheat. But that won't matter at all if there is no local buyer of those crops. In my own country for example we have successfully shown that quinoa is excellent to grow here because the Andes mountains and Sweden surprisingly have similar climates. But if you go into a shop you can still only buy Peruvian quinoa. No local buyer exists and local consumer demand is too low for an infrastructure to be built up around it.

So I say don't put all the pressure on the farmers themselves. They are working in a system that forces them to grow certain things a certain way.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    That is a problem. I generally deal with small local buyers, but it's easier when they have relatively stable needs and expect to be able to buy more or less the same product at more or less the same price, year after year. I think that's going to be less viable as the effects of climate change continue to unfold. What worked ten years ago won't work today, and what works today may not work ten years from now.

    Something I've been thinking about is how to have an internet farmers' market that doesn't suck. It's a logistical nightmare even before getting to things like food safety and disease tracking. Since cyclospora has been in the news I've been wondering how to have a better food distribution network that large-scale and small-scale buyers can get local produce from, and hopefully, with enough small-ish producers distributed over a wide area, the product offerings will be stable enough to attract enough buyers to cover the overhead of storage and distribution, quality and safety controls, etc.

    But I do think there will have to be a cultural shift. There will still be staple crops, but I think which staples grow where is going to change and keep changing, as will which staples are the most economical for people in a given area. I think that's a mindset shift that will be hard to pull off as long as we keep treating this like a problem we can address tomorrow, because acknowledging that I need to change my eating habits is an acknowledgement that it's a big problem and it's here today. It'll happen eventually as staple prices get more and more unmoored from their historical patterns, but the sooner we can build a climate-change-acknowledging food infrastructure system, and get people on board with it, the blunter the impact will be.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Two of the places I’ve lived (US) have had awesome co-op distribution systems for local farmers to distribute food. The first was in Tennessee in a suburbanish area. A nonprofit coordinated pickups from farms in the area and rented a small storefront in the historic downtown with fridges. Weekly you could shop online for local produce, dairy, meat, and even some baked goods. I was a student and was grateful they took food stamps!

    I’ve found a similar situation where I am now (big city). Another farm co-op where a non-profit facilitates the transportation and storefront, but this one only offers produce. Instead of picking up at a central location the food is dropped off at host houses locally for pickup.

    For years I’ve had the looming suspicion that a thoughtfully engineered logistics logic could make a huge difference in grassroots organizing for food security. We need logistics that connect resources to need. We need it to be well organized and easy to contribute to with well defined roles whether it be by committing to grow food, lending equipment for transportation, or driving goods from A to B. Current logistics logic caters to giant factory farms and mega corps.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    That's pretty cool. Do you remember the name of the one in TN? That's where I am and I'd love to talk with them. I know a few growers' co-ops and farmers' markets, but nothing like that. Would be cool to get involved.

    I agree, I think logistics is something that benefits from scale and it's a small part of what makes megafarms able to outcompete a more diverse field of small producers. And regardless of scale, it's just something that's hard to reason about and a lot of farmers are bad at it. If I can put together a model distribution cooperative that allows farmers to filter in, and up, and out of the industry as they age, and doesn't just entrench a new power structure that's just as bad as the one it meant to replace, I think we as a species will be a lot better able to weather what's coming.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I would gladly turn up and by grains from a big heap if it was a reliable and reasonably affordable option. I would even bring my own sacks. My bike should be able to store around 70L of grain, more if I get a trailer. Which if this became a reliable option I would possibly consider doing.

    Very brief look suggests £200/ton or 20p/kg for oats as what a farmer gets paid. I would happily pay double that to have a pile I can bag up myself.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Unfortunately raw grain can be surprisingly hard to make edible. For oats for example every single individual oat has a shell that's inedible. This is different from the bran that is edible. You would have to ground the oats up and sift away the bran. And then you are left with oat flour and not rolled oats. I would say rolled oats are impossible to make at home.

    Most people want to buy pasta, bread, white rice, not raw grain. Unfortunately for the farmers the processing of grain is a more profitable business than actually growing the grain.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Suprised you didn't choose another grain as an example, Barley_Man. :)

    Oats have been grown and eaten by families in Scotland for centuries and there's plenty of established ways to deal with it. John Gerard's Great Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) discusses the selection process for hulless oat varieties. For hulled oats, there are a variety of mechanical ways to deal with it and/or you can heat the groats up in the oven to crack the outer husk before winnowing.

    Rolled oats can be made at home using the traditional method of simply soaking then steaming and rolling them in a grain mill before drying. You can get a hand-cranked grain mill for AU$300 that can also make flakes and flours of most grains or legumes. Those prices are for fancy brand equipment for people who are into making their own flour and flakes as a hobby, but in a widespread, ongoing food security crisis, equipment to make a variety of food more edible would probably become more of a commodity item itself.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    You can do it but the effort is tremendous for very little food. First off finding a way to dehull would be mandatory as hulless varieties only exist for a few heritage varieties. Pretty much no farmer is growing that anymore. For the rolled oats you would have to soak in water, steam, hand crank to roll them and then dry them? And dry them where? Not many kgs of rolled oats would fit in a normal dehydrator.

    That's why the toasting in the oven process is by far one of the best traditional methods. We have, probably independently, invented that method here where it's called skrädmjöl and in Finland where it's called talkkuna. Not only do you get a kind of cooked flour that can be eaten raw with milk or yoghurt/fil, the toasting process itself dries out the grain and if you had grain that was too wet for storage this would make it fit for storage. However the result is a very peculiar product. It has a unique taste that could be an acquired taste for some people. Also how it traditionally is eaten results in a brown paste. I like it but I grew up eating it during yearly vacations to Finland. It's not suitable for baking as it's already cooked as a flour. It's like trying to bake bread with bread crumbs instead of flour.

    But of course in a survival situation all methods to survive are worth it. But here we talked about a farmer selling raw grain direct to consumers. And I would imagine very few are ready to get through all this to save a bit of money on their carb source, the cheapest part of most people's grocery shopping.

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