Louisiana Farm Bureau, LA
02/05/06
Climatologist: Climate Change Affects
Markets, Farmers Most
By Neil Melancon
Staff Writer
BATON ROUGE—Beyond the scope of the damage wrought by this past year’s
hurricane season, many folks in agriculture are wondering about the impact of
possible changes in weather patterns due to such conditions as global warming.
Dr. Elwynn Taylor, an Extension climatologist with Iowa State University, is
one of the folks wondering the same thing, especially in his home state which
experienced the warmest winter on record this season. Taylor, who fielded
questions at the recent Ag Expo in Monroe, La., said farmers are thinking about
climate change more and more.
“The climate’s changing, but it’s always changed and climate always will
change,” Taylor said. “Our question is, how come, how fast and how much will it
change. How do we live with it and how do we prepare for it. We have global
warming and there is no one that the climate change affects more than our
agricultural industry.”
Another way in which the weather affects farmers is the markets, where prices
can fluctuate both at home and abroad.
“The greatest risk to the price the farmer will receive is the other guy’s weather,”
he said. “So we are interested in weather two places—right on our farm and
everywhere else. One for the production and second for the marketing.”
The weather in South America is of particular concern to most farmers, where
Taylor said the weather has been favorable to growing conditions this year,
although not without some damage.
“Their corn took a bit of a beating in Argentina and southern Brazil,” Taylor said.
“Of course their corn doesn’t impact the world market too much it’s locally
consumed, but soybeans are a major export product. They haven’t suffered any
damage thus far and it looks like the rains are to about average now—they
should come out alright.”
As to the active tropical weather season of 2005, Taylor said while global
warming may play a role, active seasons are part of nature’s cycles.
“I experienced my first hurricane as an employee of the National Weather
Service assigned to Alabama, Georgia, Florida in the mid 70’s,” he said. “We had
very few hurricanes in the late 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s and the 90’s. Only one
really major one hit Florida during that whole 38 years. That was Andrew. And
then we got to 2004, four of them.
“We’ve learned that hurricanes and tropical storm activity that hits the United
States, in general, goes in cycles,” Taylor continued. “They will go 30 or 40 years
with out hardly any activity compared to what we get in the subsequent 30 or 40
years. We have a feeling that we have just moved into the high tropical storm
activity time. It’s not over with yet, it’s something we are going to have to live
with. We have to work together with it.”