breadbasket - The Environment Report

Transcript

Right now, America’s Bread Basket
relies on an aquifer that’s nearly
drained. And, many say, it will dry
up if farmers keep pumping water
from it at the current rate. Devin
Browne reports the government plans
to pay farmers as one way to get them
to cut water use:

Bob Price is every bit the Heartland farmer. He’s dressed head-to-toe in denim with a belt
buckle the size of a small plate. Just like his neighbors, he grows thirsty plants like corn
and alfalfa. But, the land is so dry and so sandy that many agricultural experts think it’s
not suitable for farming.

When Price moved to Southwestern Kansas in 1973, it didn’t seem to matter that the land
was so dry. In his pick-up, on the way to his farm, he tells me that it was the beginning
of an irrigation boom.

“Out here everyone was getting up early, going to work, and all along Highway 50 it was
irrigation pumps, irrigation pipe, engines; this was like a frontier back then.”

At that time, the government heavily subsidized the costs of irrigation. The farmers were
getting an almost immediate return. Their land appreciated almost overnight once
irrigation was established.

Farmers began to pump water – and lots of it – from one of the world’s largest
underground water supplies, the Ogallala Aquifer. They pumped two-feet of water for
every acre they farmed, right onto their crops.

“Meanwhile, the water table is declining and the water that we’re pumping is coming
from farther and farther down and, even with the same energy cost, it cost more to suck
water out of the ground from 500 feet.”

Last year, it cost Price more than $200,000 for the electricity to run the pumps to irrigate
about 900 acres of land. It’s one of the reasons he started to consider other options.

At the same time, the government, on both the state and federal level, started to think of
how to save the water left in the Ogallala Aquifer. Rivers were drying up and several
states in the Plains were suing or being sued for taking more water than they’re allowed.

Several states initiated water conservation programs as a response; Kansas was the first to
do it without the threat of a lawsuit. The program started in 2007. The strategy: pay
farmers to permanently retire their water rights.

Price had actually been wanting to take some of his land out of crops anyways. He’s a
prairie chicken enthusiast and he wants to start a guided hunting business. Prairie
chickens need prairie grass.

“So we’re farming one day, and we’re thinking, ‘sure would be nice to get that into
grass,’ but that’s an overwhelmingly expensive proposition.”

It’s not expensive to plant or grow prairie grass. You don’t need any irrigation for either.
But you do need irrigation for a cover crop that the farmers are required to grow for two
years before they can get to the grass. Susan Stover is with the Kansas Water Office.

“If we did not get something re-established there, we could have potentially dust storms
again and sand dunes moving and really big blow-outs.”

Blow-outs like Depression-Era, Dust Bowl blow-outs. So Price has to plant a cover crop
and pat double what he gets from the conservation program just to irrigate it.

Ironically, the government pays him sizeable subsidies to keep other land in corn, which
needs water from the aquifer to grow. So basically, one government program is paying
Price to stop using so much water, while, at the same time, other government programs
are paying him subsidies to grow the crops that need so much water.

Price would actually like more money to put the land back into grass, but if he wants to
lead hunting trips for prairie chickens and he wants prairie grass, there’s only one outfit
willing to pay him anything to plant that grass – the government.

For The Environment Report, I’m Devin Browne.

Theories that crops, such as the corn in Illinois, will benefit from increases in CO2 might not be as good as predicted. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Carbon dioxide emissions from our cars and factories are the number one
cause of global warming. Scientists have long theorized that more of
the gas in the atmosphere could actually help farmers grow bigger
plants. But new research from America’s Breadbasket is challenging
that assumption. David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

Lin Warfel’s a fourth generation farmer in east-central Illinois. His
fields are flat and endless, the soil chunky and black and just about
the best in the world. An Interstate highway groans on one side of his
cornfield:

“In my career, early on, there was no Interstate past my farm.”

As traffic increased over the years, Warfel noticed a strange
phenomenon. The crops closer to the Interstate grew bigger than those
further away:

“They respond to the carbon dioxide. They can stay greener longer than
plants out into the field.”

OK… so, here’s a high school biology reminder: carbon dioxide, along
with water and sun, is an ingredient in photosynthesis, which makes
plants grow.

Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also the biggest cause
of global warming. So scientists thought, huh, more carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, bigger crops. They even coined a term: the “carbon
dioxide fertilization effect:”

“The effects of CO2 on crop yields are fairly well-understood.”

The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor has studied this stuff since the
1980s:

“We would expect that by the year 2050, that the increase in CO2 alone
would probably increase yields by about 10 to 15% in soybean, wheat and
rice relative to today’s yield, with nothing else changing.”

Other things are changing, like hotter temperatures and more drought.
But the predominant thinking has been that the increased carbon dioxide
will moderate those negative factors, maybe even outweigh them. A
recent study by the American Economic Review concluded U.S. agriculture
profits will grow by more than a billion dollars over the next century,
due to global warming. Most of this is based on experiments done in
controlled, greenhouse conditions, but new research done in real fields
is challenging the assumptions:

“Where you’re standing is what we refer to as our global change
research facility on the south farms of the University of Illinois.”

That’s biologist Steve Long. He runs what’s called the SoyFACE project
at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Here, Long can
actually pipe carbon dioxide gas out to the fields, and grow real crops
in an atmosphere of the future.

Long strolls out to one of 16 test plots and stop at a white pipe
sticking out of the ground:

“This is one of the pipes where the carbon dioxide actually comes up
and then it will go out into the field here.”

The carbon dioxide pipes circle a plot about the size of a tennis
court. They release the gas over the crops. Computers monitor the air
to keep the concentrations steady:

“And the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about
380 parts per million. We’re raising that to the level which is
expected for the year 2050, which is about 550 parts per million.”

Long has grown the crops of 2050 for 5 years now. His results
shocked him. The plants did grow bigger. They survived longer
into the fall, but the yields were 50% lower than expected. And
pests thrived. The Western corn rootworm, for example, laid
twice as many eggs:

“Japanese beetle, which eats quite a lot of the leaves of soybeans, do
twice as well under these elevated CO2 conditions. They live longer. They
produce many more young. The yield increases we’ve seen could start to be
counteracted by those increased pest problems.”

Long’s results found supporters and critics when published in
Science magazine last summer. Some researchers say extra CO2
could hurt agriculture more than it helps because weeds become more
aggressive.

The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor co-wrote a paper challenging the
interpretation of Long’s data. But he agrees more work needs to be
done in real-life conditions:

“The bigger questions that are now before us are the interactions of CO2 with
warming and change in precip, changes in weed communities, changes in
insect communities, changes in disease outbreak. There are a lot more
questions there than there are answers.”

Amthor says what’s at stake is our future food supply.

For The Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

Tag: breadbasket

Keeping the Breadbasket From Drying Up

Transcript

Related Links

Co2 Crops Not Tops

Transcript

Related Links