FARMERS ON THE FRONTLINES: A changing climate creates new challenges--and opportunities to make a difference.

AuthorEisen, Marc

When you ask Harriet Behar if farmers can lead the fight against global warming, her optimism bubbles up like the seven freshwater springs on the 216 acres that she and her husband, Aaron Brin, tend in the rolling hills of central Wisconsin.

Of course, we can, Behar says, drawing on her considerable experience as evidence. For almost fifty years, Behar has worked just about every angle of organic farming--as a vegetable grower, farm co-op outreach liaison, agricultural educator, organic inspector, and even a stint as chair of the National Organic Standards Board. Now she is a beekeeper and commercial herb grower.

Behar has no doubt that diversified, Earth-friendly farms, if supported by an engaged public, can turn things around on the climate front. "We have to be optimistic," she tells me. "Look at the monarch butterfly. It's not like they're fully back, but their numbers are rising. We know what to do to bring them back." (Plant and protect milkweed from herbicides. Protect their overwintering sites in the oyamel fir forests of Mexico.)

We're not that dense. That's why we should address climate change. We know how to deal with that.

-Harriet Behar

Harriet Behar and her husband farm 216 acres in the rolling hills of central Wisconsin. Behar is pictured at left in her high tunnel and below left in her solar greenhouse.

"We're not that stupid. We're not that dense," Behar says with a chuckle. "That's why we should address climate change. We know how to deal with that."

It's a huge challenge, given that farming itself is a hellacious contributor to greenhouse gasses that produce higher temperatures. So what do you do when farming can be both an accelerant and a retardant to a warming Earth? Behar and other like-minded farmers see a way forward.

Their insights are important. As Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward argue in their upcoming book, Dirt Road Revival, we need more voices shaping the climate-change response than just "Tesla-driving Silicon Valley technocrats and wealthy suburbanites."

"We need," they write, "the wisdom of rural folks in those discussions--the rooted wisdom of those who grow our food, who live every day in the natural world, who are profoundly more connected to the land."

Well, yeah. Who knows the quirks and threats of weather and climate better than farmers? They always keep an eye out for distant storm clouds. A not-unfamiliar theme quickly emerged when I talked to a half-dozen or so farmers from around the country. Weather has become erratic. Disturbingly so.

"In the Midwest, this past growing season was one of the best ever," says Jim Goodman, a retired dairy farmer in central Wisconsin. "But you don't have to go far in any direction, and it was tough. Really dry to the point that they couldn't harvest their crops."

Take his wife's cousin, Pat Hennen, who grows corn and soybeans in southwest Minnesota. Up until a good rainfall came on August 20, 2021, his fields were dangerously parched, having gotten only four inches of rain the entire summer. In his nearly four decades of farming, Hennen says, only 1988 and 2012 compare for dryness.

Asked whether this might be evidence of a changing climate, Hennen replies, "I just don't know what to believe, to be honest with you." He is not alone. Farmers don't speak with one...

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