In the last five years I have spent much of my time talking about climate to extension agents and agricultural producers. I have learned so much from them about agricultural production and the decisions farmers need to make in their daily work scheduling as well as their long-term planning. Weather and climate are always on their mind. I try to capture that relationship between climate and agriculture in this blog.
But I often choose to discuss climate science in terms of droughts and extreme weather, which farmers understand and respond to, rather than in terms of the changing climate. This is true even though most farmers I know are well aware of the changes we are seeing in our climate conditions over time, even if they don’t attribute the changes to human causes. This New York Times article does an excellent job of describing the environment that I work in as an agricultural climatologist.
