The Climate Change Front

Bramblings
Becky Nelson
A few raspberries are ripening in the pick your own patch. As we have for the last several years, we will most likely be celebrating our Independence Day in the fields and the berries. The earliest variety of the four raspberry varieties we offer is slated to ripen at the end of June, and this year’s crop seems to be coming right on time, if not a little later. We always plan to open the patch around the 4th of July, and the calendar and the crop seem to be in sync this year, if not a little earlier than in the past.

We have been interviewed about the changing landscape of farming a couple of times over he last month, which has me trying to remember years past. When my parents were living and working the farm with us, we usually opened the raspberry patch to the picking public a week or so after the 4th. Looking at the varieties we were growing thirty years ago, three of the four were well entrenched when we first planted. Each year, ripening is affected by whatever weather conditions prevail…this year, a cold spring and a couple periods of cooler than normal early summer weather seems to have set things back a little bit at the start, but the berries are ripening earlier than I remember and could really explode with a week of summer weather forecast to start this weekend. As usual, we wait and see.

Farming has always been an enterprise of change and of waiting to see what is around the corner. We must adapt to changing weather patterns, changing economic pressures, changes in consumer interests and demands. Changing to adapt to increasingly changing weather and climate changes is proving to be the greatest challenge to us in our careers thus far. Chaotic weather shifts from super cold to super hot, super dry to super wet and super calm to super windy has proved to be frustrating.

As we told reporters recently, the toughest challenge is to plan for the unexpected. Whether that is by installing irrigation in case of drought or building water bars and ditches or installing drainage in case of too much rain, planting on plastic to preserve moisture in case of dry weather or keep weed pressure from taking over the crops, erecting high tunnels to protect early and late crops from weather and temperature fluctuations, everything comes at a cost.

We small and medium sized farmers work at very small margins. You may wonder why your berries, vegetables and fruits are so expensive, but the inputs for growing food are incredibly high. Economic pressures in the workplace have forced us to raise our wages, which is a huge hit to these small margins. We at our farm are trying to control these costs by putting our own backs to much of the work so we need to hire fewer people. This is not a sustainable venture for us, as we are aging and can physically do less, so we are looking at ways of growing and producing to cut the need for so much labor. The costs of supplies…everything from diesel fuel and fertilizer to electricity and berry boxes have skyrocketed, and we have to reflect those increases in the cost of our products. Squash will cost more. Cucumbers will cost more. Berries will cost more. If that has an impact on the amount of produce we can sell, we will certainly have to take a long, hard look at what we are doing and either adapt or stop whatever enterprises are no longer reliable for we farmers to make a living.

Being prepared to handle the unexpected and the changes are nothing new for farming. Here at our family farm, we have transitioned from raising sheep in centuries before me to diversified, subsistence farming, to dairy production, to replacement heifer production, to hay and beef production and now to diversified beef, fruit, berry and vegetable production. But climate change, global warming, or whatever

we want to call the problem is very real and showing its effects today, poised to show more intense effects as we plod forward.

The other day, I opened a little hay shed where I keep feed for our resident goat friends at our store. Inside the door was curled a snake…taking a break from hunting mice and insects, it was doing no harm, but changed my plans in a hurry. I didn’t know what to do…try to move it? Try to get around it? If I closed the door, it would have squashed it, should I close the door? Dilemmas like this are an everyday occurrence in farming. Do I plant it? Will it produce a crop? Will people buy it if I charge what I need to in order to make a few pennies for myself? As for the snake, I left the door open, avoided it and let it take its time to make its way back into the grass away from the building. Avoidance isn’t always the best decision, and I think that snake of avoidance is beginning to bite at us on the climate change front. I don’t know where the snake is going, but I do know it is staring us in the face.

Becky Nelson is owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, eighth generation in a multi-generational farm that was established in 1780. She can be reached at [email protected].