The midwestern Corn Belt, which covers parts of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas, will be unsuitable for cultivating corn by the year 2200 if climate change continues.
The future climate conditions will cause a near collapse of corn cultivation in the Midwestern U.S. by the year 2200, according to a study published in Environmental.
Emily Burchfield used climate and soil data to model where crops would be successful in a warmer future. The Corn Belt will become unsuitable to cultivate corn by the year 2200 under a scenario with high or moderate greenhouse gas emissions.
Changes to the way crops are grown will be necessary to continue corn farming in the United States, according to a paper by Burchfield.
The projections may be pessimistic because they don't account for all of the ways that technology may help farmers adapt and rise to the challenge.
Midwestern farmers have been able to adapt to climate change. Farmers in the U.S. harvest more corn per acre today than they did 100 years ago. Some of the changes have been helpful to combat rising temperatures, according to a study. Plants have a cooling effect on the environment, so planting closer together has reduced the effects of global warming on corn crops. Farmers have adjusted to higher temperatures by planting crops earlier in the season and cross-breeding Mexican varieties of corn.
Many in the Midwestern corn industry haven't experienced any harmful impacts from climate change yet because of the usual annual variation in weather. Some farmers stopped planting corn because of the bad weather.
Taylor Moreland, owner of Moreland Seed in Centralia, Mo., told Yahoo News that it was hard to gauge what the trend was. The year was kind of a dry one. A lot of corn couldn't be planted because the ground was wet. Most farmers around here haven't been able to plant corn yet this year because it has been so wet.
Moreland pointed out that the Midwest has always seen wide fluctuations in weather.
He said that the weather patterns tend to change. There were a couple years in a row where the family would be broke because of the crops burning up.
If the land is allowed to lie fallow without being redeveloped for half, it could be used to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
While the current Corn Belt could lose its crop, places like northern Minnesota and parts of Canada could become well suited to growing corn for the first time.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate change will decrease agricultural yields. Massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
American farms will be more resistant to climate change if they switch from monoculture to more diverse crops.
If we push against biophysical realities, we will eventually reach ecological collapse.
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