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Climate change will impact agriculture in the Midwest

A Cornell-led study shows that Midwestern agriculture is especially vulnerable to climate change.

Ariel Ortiz-Bobea says the region’s reliance on corn and soybeans could cause challenges in the future.

“In a way it’s like putting all the eggs in the crop basket and that crop basket is becoming more vulnerable to this free input that falls from the sky,” he says.

He tells Brownfield previous studies focused on the vulnerability of field crops, but this study looked at ag production and livestock at the national level.

To get the big picture, Ortiz-Bobea says they used climate data from 1960-2004 and looked at how inputs like seeds, fertilizer, and equipment are converted into economic outputs in each state.

“We wanted to know are these changes in more productive agriculture also making agriculture more resilient to these climatic shocks,” he says.

Ortiz-Bobea says growers in the west, southwest, and southern plains will cope better with weather extremes because of their use of irrigation.