A Ramble About Climate and Farming

 My wife and I went to get more hay yesterday from a farmer not too far away. As we were loading the hay, we were chatting. As it turned out, this farmer was the former sheriff of Ohio County, and he was in office during the huge tornado that hit here just a few years ago shortly after we arrived. What stuck in my mind about that conversation was how he was talking about one or more of his neighbors not being able to plant that season after that. It's the case this year too. We dodged local tornadoes but many of the fields are still flooded even weeks after the latest "1000 year storm" blew through. The window for getting the crops in on time is closing. It's a distinctly rural America problem, but it doesn't just impact the farmers here. In fact, the more I thought about it, things like this are absolutely devastating for everyone. Let me explain.
     What is the absolute foundation of human civilization? Farming. To urban ears, that might sound ridiculous, but it is and has always been farming for thousands of years. Human beings didn't stop being hunter-gathers and settle down into population centers and settlements until they started intentionally planting crops and keeping livestock. Ancient cities couldn't exist without the food production to support them, and neither can modern cities.
     To support a city area like Southern California, for example, which boasts a population of fifteen million people give or take, you need an obscene amount of food production, almost none of which is really local to places like Los Angeles, Orange County, or San Diego (yes California is a huge agricultural state, but it focuses more on luxury or specialty crops). Almost all of the staple foods like wheat, rice, corn, and so on are imported, and this is true of New York, Chicago, and all of the major cities in the United States and around the world. Most of it is produced elsewhere, either in more rural states such as Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Kentucky, and so on, or it is produced overseas in places like China, Thailand, and India in the case of rice.
      The most important thing needed in farming is a stable, predictable climate. One of the things I've noticed being here in Kentucky is the weeds. What's interesting about them is that you don't always get the same kinds of weeds every year in the same quantities. Why? Because of variations in the climate and weather patterns. How hot it gets and how early, how much or how little rain we get and when, or how late the freezes go impact which weeds we get. Plants will only grow when the conditions are favorable for them to grow, and every plant has its own particular conditions for growth, be it a weed or a crop. The only reason farming is possible is because the farmer can trust that he or she's going to be able to predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy when to plant, how hot or how cold it's going to be, and how much rain the ground's going to get. If the farmer can't be certain of any of that, it's a complete crap shoot. More and more over the last several years, farming has been becoming like taking your money to Vegas and seeing what happens.
     There have been too many years recently where the climate has completely turned against the farmers with flooded fields or crops scorched by summer sun so hot that they wither and die in the fields. This isn't a problem even confined to the United States as the increasingly unstable climate worldwide has impacted basic food crop production. And this doesn't just impact the price of, say bread or rice. It impacts the price of meat too as it becomes more expensive to keep livestock fed when grain supplies get squeezed.
     Climate-wise, there've been several indications now that we've passed the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold for warming, and this is the cause for all of the unstable weather which has been impacting the farms. We've passed it, and we're still getting warmer. We get warmer, the weather patterns become even more unstable. When the weather patterns become more unstable they can't be predicted. When you can't predict the weather, you can't farm reliably. When you can't farm reliably, you can't have large human settlements or populations centers.
     In the Book of Revelation, it talks about one of the seals being famine, and a very small amount of wheat (maybe enough for a loaf of bread) being sold for about a day's wages (a denarius in the text). This is already the reality in more parts of the world than people in the United States realize. As the weather becomes impossible to reliably farm with, it will become the reality here too, and when that happens, civilization will fall because its very foundation will have been pulled out from underneath it.