The climate of the future is already here, but it’s here in pieces, very unevenly distributed. We don’t yet know which of those pieces will become more common until they become normal, which will become less common until they disappear from our lives. That’s how the weather changes, not by a gradual wave of average change, but in the unevenly distributed events that generate those averages, heat waves becoming more common, snows disappearing. The future is arriving, one broken piece at a time, each piece made out of the broken bits of the past, each piece breaking things as it comes.
—FRANK LANDIS, HOT EARTH DREAMS
This final part of the book is not to provide answers or solutions, but to offer potentially useful lenses to look through, ways to hold the issues. As discussed in part three, there is perhaps no greater or more unpredictable challenge to our food supply (whether industrial or local) than the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. We need to quickly prepare our food production for eventual climate collapse, as well as for short-term changes and even sudden weather events.
Northern Colorado’s thousand-year rain and five-hundred-year flood in the late summer of 2013 brought this realization to the forefront in our state, causing many to begin considering a haunting question: how can we significantly increase local food production in the face of increasingly erratic weather and a shrinking water supply? In some areas, such as Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, food localization advocates are wondering if it’s even remotely possible to meet this challenge.
It’s a harrowing situation we face with global warming, certainly, but there are actions we can take. Food localization can play a crucial role, offering a powerful way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and reverse the profound damage already done to our environment.
In Colorado, producers are exploring ways to increase local food production while sequestering carbon, reducing the use of fossil fuels, and utilizing growing methods that require less water. For instance, we are witnessing a dramatic rise in controlled-environment agriculture (greenhouses, hydroponics, aquaponics, and aeroponics), which makes possible efficient, large-scale food production on small acreage.
Local entrepreneur Buck Adams has pioneered greenhouse technologies in the two companies he founded: Circle Fresh Farms, which was a major supplier of tomatoes to Whole Foods in Colorado; and Veterans to Farmers, a nonprofit organization that trains veterans in greenhouse production and management and offers them opportunities in cooperative ownership. Hoop houses and high tunnels are popping up on local farms at a record pace, despite regulatory resistance to non-permanent structures. Veterans to Farmers, for example, is involved in plans to build forty acres of greenhouses on city of Denver land.
The Savory Institute—through its holistic range-management process—is demonstrating that properly managed herds of cattle and sheep can actually restore grasslands otherwise headed toward desertification. Hundreds of thousands of acres in Colorado are already under some form of holistic management.
In his latest book, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers in Adapting to Climate Uncertainty, Gary Paul Nabhan advocates the use of locally produced compost to increase the moisture-holding capacity of fields, orchards, and vineyards; reducing bureaucratic hurdles to rainwater harvesting and gray water on private lands; and transitioning to perennial agriculture, especially tree crops and grass pastures. Nabhan notes that investing in such measures would be far more effective than doling out billions in crop-insurance payments—in 2012, the United States gave $11.6 billion to farmers hit with diminished yields or all-out crop failures.
Finally, permaculture practitioners are demonstrating scalable food production and water conservation methods in areas previously considered unsuitable for farming.
Beyond mitigation and remediation, local food systems must become resilient enough to withstand an increasing number of extreme weather events, as well as rapid climate change more generally. Some scientists warn that global temperature increases of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius are possible within the next decade or so. Agriculture as we have known it would cease to be possible at those temperatures, so it is imperative that resilient production methods be quickly developed. And at the same time, it is important to realize that it is highly unlikely that industrialized agriculture will be able to continue under such conditions, which could lead to widespread famine and conflict if local food systems do not increase production in time to meet these challenges.