Key Takeaways
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Climate Hubs, which link USDA research and programs with nine different regions, work with farmers across the country to help them mitigate and adapt to climate change.
- The Midwest Climate Hub, located at the USDA agricultural research lab at Iowa State University, conducts and communicates scientific research for farmers across eight midwestern states. Importantly, the hub overcomes outreach challenges in rural communities by working directly with farmers and trusted local partners to ensure that locally tailored research, tools and assistance help farmers make informed decisions.
- The hub’s early work has helped farmers in the region adapt to changing weather conditions and protect their crops and livelihoods by providing targeted, locally specific information on changing freeze dates, among other information.
- Going forward, a new federal grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture will leverage the hub’s strong local outreach to expand its focus to include more climate mitigation-focused activities. Additionally, continued federal funding for all the USDA Climate Hubs will be critical for advancing the hubs’ climate work with farmers.
THE CHALLENGE
The agricultural sector depends on specific climate conditions to thrive, and significant and unpredictable changes in climate can disrupt the sector. Changes in the climate and resulting extreme weather have already occurred and are increasing challenges for agriculture, both nationally and globally.
In the Midwest, climate change impacts include changes in growing seasons, extreme precipitation events, flooding, and severe droughts. These impacts are expected to continue or intensify in the future, causing direct and indirect effects on production and profitability on major crops like corn and soybeans.
causing direct and indirect effects on production and profitability on major crops like corn and soybeans.
In fact, a report by EDF found that by 2030, corn yields in Iowa will be 5 to 25% lower than where they would be without climate change. By 2050, corn yields across the state will be at least 10% lower than where they would be without climate change. Lower yields in high-value crops could have profound ripple effects on local communities, Midwestern states’ economies as well as the nation’s food security.
Addressing these issues isn’t always straightforward, however. Farmers require hyper-local information; different stakeholders are involved in different parts of the process; and diverging from traditional practices can seem like a risky endeavor for a community where the margins for risk are already dangerously thin. For this reason, innovative practices are often slow to assimilate into many farming communities.
MAKING THE CONNECTION
The Midwest Climate Hub brings partners together to promote adaptation
The Midwest Climate Hub is one of nine regional Climate Hubs created to help address this challenge. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) established the nine hubs throughout the United States to provide regional agricultural communities with locally tailored climate information. They also conduct research and develop adaptive technologies.
Located in Ames, Iowa on the Iowa State University campus, the hub services the rich agricultural states of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois. There are almost one million producers focused on livestock, crops and other agricultural products, across these eight states, according to the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture.
What makes the regional climate hubs so unique is that they not only collect and synthesize the latest regional climate data, but they also bring together partners who work directly with farmers in their communities – a key ingredient to ensuring that the latest climate information actually gets out into the field and used by farmers. Education, outreach and engagement are embedded in the hubs’ mission.
They also bring together partners who work directly with farmers in their communities – a key ingredient to ensuring that the latest climate information actually gets out into the field and used by farmers.
Effectively communicating with farmers and giving them the tools they need to navigate and adapt to a changing climate is a major challenge. Agriculture is incredibly diverse across the nation’s landscapes, and insight into production challenges and emerging technologies or innovative practices in one region may have very little value in another region. In part for this reason, farmers tend to place greater emphasis on farmer-to-farmer communications and local networks. They prefer to hear from a neighbor who has tried and tested these emerging climate-resilient practices and has proof that these practices work.
Since the climate hub has a small staff, they rely heavily on partnerships with organizations and entities that already have strong relationships with farmers, such as Land Grant University extension offices.
In order to extend its reach, the hubs provide both direct outreach to farmers and leverages existing channels of trust, education and communication to establish indirect contact with farmers. Communication about adaptation and mitigation is channeled through the indirect route by providing Extension professionals, Natural Resources Conversation Service (NRCS) staff, and crop advisors with up-to-date climate information, said Laurie Nowatzke, Midwest Climate Hub Coordinator.
“We value these opportunities so that we can hear from producers and educators about the challenges they’re experiencing when it comes to climate change, conservation, and agricultural production,” Nowatzke said. “This helps us tailor our programs and outreach in a way that’s useful to the agricultural community.”
For example, The Midwest Climate Hub, working with the Midwestern Regional Climate Center, created a freeze date tool, to help producers respond to changes in the freeze dates, Nowatzke said. For example, apple orchards in the Midwest might face threat from changes in the timing of when the last frost happens in the spring. If it happens too late after blooms have already formed on their trees, it could put their crop at risk.
The freeze date tool provides information about the climatology of freezing temperature dates across the north-central and northeastern United States and can be used to answer questions, such as what day of the year does a county experience its first fall freeze or how the dates of the late spring freeze have changed over time across the region.
“There’s a lot of different kinds of pressures that the agricultural community faces as a result of climate unpredictability — that can include pests and disease as well and how that’s shifting throughout the region. We’re always trying to keep our finger on the pulse in terms of what’s needed in the area,” Nowatzke said.
“The materials that we develop are a direct response to the concerns that we hear from the agricultural community,” Nowatzke said. “The Freeze Date Tool is an example of this dialogue; each year, we hear of anxieties in some subregion of the Midwest that is concerned about an early fall frost or a late spring freeze. By displaying county-level trends in these events, some farmers may feel better equipped to adapt and adjust their on-farm management.”
Another pressing concern in the region is drought. This is especially precarious in the Northwestern and Southern parts of Iowa.
Flooding events are also a big concern every year in some parts of the region.
“On one hand, we’re trying to keep outreach professionals in the region like [university] extension folks or state agencies informed about what’s going on in real time, with those events, but also develop and promote strategies that help farmers and producers cope with the unpredictability around flooding and drought,” Nowatzke said.
Michigan Tech University is one of the climate hub’s partners, where scientists are compiling climate data for each state to describe how the climate has changed over time and how it’s projected to change in the future. The Midwest Climate Hub is summarizing this data into eight, concise state-focused reports which highlight the vulnerabilities that farmers or producers might experience as a result of climate change and potential strategies for dealing with those changes. They are also collaborating with extension professionals and state agencies to disseminate this vital information to farmers.
Since it has become increasingly difficult to hide from these visible impacts of climate change, producers, extension providers, other agriculture service providers and the agriculture community overall have been very receptive to the information the Climate Hub puts out, said Nowatzke.
WHAT’S NEXT
In January 2022, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative awarded the Midwest Climate Hub and its partners a $1.5 million grant for work on a climate-smart agriculture bank — funding research surrounding climate-smart agriculture in the Midwest. This program is an example of Climate Hub’s work to not only focus on how the agriculture sector can adapt to the changing climate, but how farmers can be an active participant in mitigating climate change.
“In the early years of Climate Hub, we [climate hub] hadn’t focused on mitigation as much, knowing we needed to really address adaptation issues,” Nowatzke, Midwest said. “We’re starting to work towards additional programs and projects that specifically focus on mitigation — reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or offsetting greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Climate Hub’s experience in developing and communicating tailored tools and information supporting adaptation make it the right partner for the job. Agriculture is a major source of emissions in the U.S, and new federal programs are taking aim at this sector. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, provides billions in new funding for climate-smart agriculture practices for farmers across the country. However, as the hub has seen with adaptation, a one-size-fits-all approach to deploying new tools and approaches is not an effective strategy for farmers. It requires local partnerships and open dialogue to meet farmers where they are.
The 3-year project, titled “Accelerating the Transition to Climate-Smart Strategies by Bolstering the Extension to Midwest Climate Hub Connection” and more concisely referred to as Climate Ready Midwest, will aim to improve shared understanding of needs of the Midwest’s diverse stakeholders and develop strategies for climate-smart agriculture.
Some examples of climate-smart agriculture include no-till farming, which is used on a third of Iowa acres of corn and soybeans, as well as planting cover crops. While conventional tilling releases carbon stored within the soil, no-till farming minimizes soil disturbance, keeping carbon secured beneath the soil surface. Cover crops, which are planted to cover the soil rather than for harvesting, capture carbon dioxide into the soil. In addition to the climate mitigation benefits, these climate-smart agriculture practices also offer a range of conservation and resilience benefits for farmers.
Ohio State University is leading the project, and the Midwest Climate Hub will work with the university and other partners to carry it out.
“How can we take the existing science and bolster extensions, connections, and roles, and ability to work with agricultural community on those strategies?” Nowatzke said.
“How can we take the existing science and bolster extensions, connections, and roles, and ability to work with agricultural community on those strategies?” Nowatzke said.
Long term, Nowatzke hopes that the Midwest Climate Hub can help stakeholders and the organizations who work with farmers and producers develop a library of resources of practices that help address climate change in Midwest agriculture, including mitigation practices. Sustained federal funding for the climate hubs will be essential for scaling that work.
“I always want people to know that we consider ourselves at the Midwest Hub to be really strong at understanding the landscape of people and organizations and work that’s being done around climate and agriculture in the Midwest,” Nowatzke said.
“I think farmers or producers already know that they can go to their county offices or their extension specialists for help with a lot of these issues, but if they don’t know where to go then the Midwest hub is a great place to come, and we can point people in the right direction to find the resources that they’re looking for.”
Policy Lessons
As policymakers, communities and businesses take hold of new climate investments in the U.S., these case studies offer several key policy lessons on how to maximize the impact of federal funding through collaboration, information sharing and tailoring the funding approach. These examples show that federal funding, if designed well and implemented in partnership with communities and businesses, can strengthen a community’s resilience, create new jobs and economic opportunities, lower household energy costs and slash climate pollution.
- Community vision should guide federal support.
- Leveraging trusted voices and networks can enhance the adoption of new solutions.
- Underserved communities should be prioritized for federal climate funding.
- Technical assistance is a critical enabler.
- Funding pilot projects can put solutions to the test in real-world conditions, supporting broader scale-up.
- Program evaluation can help drive even more impactful investments in the future.