the inflexibility of monocultures will be their undoing. [View all]

read this by charlie pierce today, and it sorta scared the bejeebus out of me-
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27611439/american-farmers-climate-change-effects/

watching the real farmers in my state and elsewhere, struggling to get anything into the fields in this mud, specialized and mechanized to the point of being paralyzed by bad weather, i wonder what can be done. what are the alternatives that could withstand completely unpredictable climate?

this spring has really sucked for my little farm. had a great crop of seedlings, busting w life. when i got them into my hoop house, and my little lean to greenhouse, the sun went out and the temps dropped, and everything is just shivering. i am dodging the raindrops, trying to get it done a little at a time.
find myself agonizing over my need for a real, year round greenhouse if this project is ever gonna meet it's potential. i mean, it is an insurance policy that i am pretty sure i would cash and more than once.

but dang, the big guys are getting creamed.
million dollar machines, mired in the muck.
or tossed by a tornado.
operations so specialized and mechanized that they are just stuck growing what they grow, or nothing at all.

so, what would i want?
i would be looking for shorter and shorter season varieties, so that i could still plant in june, even late june and have something, even if it isnt as good as my regular crop.
i'd want equipment advances that let me get cheaper, interchangeable tools to allow for more flexibility.
grants, loans, or even co-ops for tools and info.
how about saving some of those old fashioned machines, which care more adept?

but the dreamer in me also floats off to the perfect universe.
what if refugees from rice growing cultures could get into these soggy fields? could they pull off a crop? what would it take to facilitate that? the civilian reclamation and emergency planting corp?

i wonder how some of the permies are doing. seems to me that if i am ready to plant a green manure/soil enhancing fallow crop on a regular basis, i am ready to pounce on this, all this topsoil that the floods just gifted me, plant my daikon, my alfalfa, my clover, and wait it out for a year, w/o a complete backslide.

maybe some govt grants to plant more permanent crops, on at least parts of farms that lay in the path of repeated weather/water issues?


how would the blue do it?
what do we offer farmers? i think that any that still wondered about climate change are thinking again after inland icebergs.