From Apples to Popcorn, Climate Change Is Altering the Foods America Grows

The impact may not yet be obvious in grocery stores and greenmarkets, but behind the organic apples and bags of rice and cans of cherry pie filling are hundreds of thousands of farmers, plant breeders and others in agriculture who are scrambling to keep up with climate change.

Montmorency tart cherries waiting to be harvested
 in Leelanau County in northern Michigan.

Drop a pin anywhere on a map of the United States and you’ll find disruption in the fields. Warmer temperatures are extending growing seasons in some areas and sending a host of new pests into others. Some fields are parched with drought, others so flooded that they swallow tractors.

Decades-long patterns of frost, heat and rain — never entirely predictable but once reliable enough — have broken down. In regions where the term climate change still meets with skepticism, some simply call the weather extreme or erratic. But most agree that something unusual is happening.

Read the story from The New York Times by Kim Severson - “From Apples to Popcorn, Climate Change Is Altering the Foods America Grows.”

Severe drought threatens wild horses in American West: ‘Every animal in the desert is dying from thirst’

Volunteers and government officials are scrambling to protect wild horses in the American West, where the animals are facing harsh drought conditions that have already led to dozens of deaths.

Wild horses in the American West face dangerous drought
conditions that have dried of their food and water supplies.

In a stretch of land that includes parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, land managers are rushing to help the horses survive through the dry conditions that have reached an intensity in some areas that have not been seen for decades, if not centuries.

“It has never been this bad,”  Simone Netherlands, the president of  Arizona-based Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, told The Independent. 

Read the Clark Mindock story from the Independent - “Severe drought threatens wild horses in American West: ‘Every animal in the desert is dying from thirst’.”