My husband has farmed for 4 decades. Climate change might end his run.
Make hay while the sun shines, people sometimes say to my husband, Adam, when he tells them hes a hay farmer. All they know about hay, I imagine, is that proverbial instruction to make the most of the moment. See also: Strike while the iron is hot. For most of us, these expressions are figurative. For hay farmers and blacksmiths, they simply describe the conditions of work. If you dont strike while the iron is hot, it wont bend. If you dont use the long, sunny days of summer to cut, dry, rake and bale your hay, youll lose your crop. Adam has always been determined to make the most of our short growing season in Upstate New York. He resists planning summer trips, arrives at daytime parties after dusk, commits to nothing further out on the calendar than the meteorologist can (sort of) foresee. But as we come to the end of the wettest July on record , make hay while the sun shines has been shifting from self-evident axiom to rueful irony. Yes, you have to make hay while you can. But also you need sunshine to make hay. Heres how it works. It takes at least two sunny days to complete the cycle: mow, dry, rake, bale. Much of that time is waiting for the sun to do its work. (The hay must dry completely, because moisture can breed heat-producing bacteria deep inside a bale which might then spontaneously combust and burn down a barn.) In theory, if Adam mowed a field on a Tuesday morning, he could expect to bale it late Wednesday afternoon. In a good year what we used to call a normal year Adam would have extended stretches of sunny days that went like this: Mow in the morning, then unload wagons piled with bales from fields mowed two days before, then, in the afternoon, rake and finally bale the field he mowed yesterday. In a good year what we used to call a normal year he would have 8,000 or 9,000 bales in the barns by now. This year, hes got around 2,000. Thats because Adam cant mow if its raining, or if rain is forecast that day or the next. He cant mow if the fields are so wet that his tractor would sink in the mud. And this year, weve had record-breaking rainfall . Last year, there was a drought. The hay was easy to get in, but there wasnt much of it ( most local farmers had a terrible year ). The year before that was extremely wet ; it was the first summer ever that Adam couldnt get all the fields cut. But, along with the rest of the country , were starting to realize that anomalous years are now, paradoxically, the norm. Theres no longer any standard from which each summer might or might not deviate. All we can rely on is increasingly extreme weather wrought by climate change. Heres how it works. Climate change means higher air temperatures, and higher air temperatures produce more heat waves, more evaporation (causing more droughts and wildfires), more saturated air (causing more extreme rainfall) and hotter ocean temperatures ( giving hurricanes more energy). More heat, more drought, more rain, more flooding, more unbreathable air. (Yes, weve had that, too. ) Extreme drought took a heavy toll on U.S. farms last year: Corn, wheat and rice yields suffered; Texas cotton farmers abandoned two-thirds of their crop. This year, extreme heat and drought are wreaking havoc on Sun Belt farms, while flooding has destroyed crops throughout the Northeast . Im always amazed at how farmers are able to adapt, Aaron Gabriel, an agronomy educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension , told me genially when I called to complain about the weather er, ask him about the New York farmers he serves. He agreed that the climate crisis has caused some fundamental changes, but, he said, I try to give a little bit of hope by having old-time farmers think about how many things theyve had to change over the decades. Adam has stopped planting alfalfa, his most lucrative crop, because it doesnt grow well in wetter fields. He has changed the order and reduced the number of fields he hays. Hes willing to work in extreme heat and yellow haze, when the weatherman (and his own wife) say he shouldnt. But the effects and hence the agricultural impact of climate change are just going to get worse. In his other job, as a councilman for the town of New Scotland, N.Y., Adam has helped update the law to allow for more solar projects and led an effort to bring 13 towns into a collective with the power to choose greener energy. His own efforts to stem the climate crisis as a public servant and as a citizen might help future farmers, if were lucky but not him. Hes had a good run, doing the job for as long as the conditions allowed. I guess you could say that he struck while the iron was hot. After four decades, though, Adam is wondering what farmers across the country must be wondering, whether theyre considering different crops or different careers: Now what?