Nathan Hunt looked out over his corn and soybean fields shrouded in a thick haze in late June. Smoke from Canada’s wildfires had made it unpleasant to breath. The state’s air quality was some of the worst on the planet.
It all made the 37-year-old Miami County farmer wonder: What’s this doing to my crops?
“You just assume that it's probably not great,” he said.
It’s a question more growers are asking as smoke and haze events brought on by climate change are becoming more common across Indiana.
Wildfires are consuming three times more of the United States and Canada each year than in the 1980s. Studies predict fire and smoke to worsen as the climate continues to produce more extreme weather caused by heat-trapping gases spewed into the air.
Indiana has seen smoky days in the past, but the days-long event in late June marked the most severe occurrence yet, according to Dan Quinn, an assistant professor of agronomy and the Extension corn specialist at Purdue University.
For farmers, that made this year’s event all but impossible to ignore.
“I think it was a pretty big wake up call,” Quinn said. “Farmers are very curious and really trying to understand how it is impacting their plants.”
But answering that question is tricky.
Days of haze and smoke mean crops receive less direct sunlight, which they need to photosynthesize and grow, explained Quinn. The harmful chemicals in smoke are also absorbed by plants and can hurt yields. Corn is especially vulnerable to those adverse effects during flowering and pollination, he said.
But smoke can actually benefit crops, and there’s a good chance this year’s haze did just that.
Smoke refracts light, which allows plants to more efficiently absorb sunrays and photosynthesize. It also helps keep crops cool and allows them to retain more moisture, Quinn explained. That’s especially useful during the hot, dry weather that many parts of Indiana have experienced this year.
“The drought stress has been a little bit more impactful on potential yield losses, and we actually saw the smoke and haze issues kind of help the plants a little bit,” Quinn said.
What makes assessing smoke’s impact on crops so tricky is the myriad factors that play into how crops mature and thrive.
Those complications and the inability to accurately replicate smoke events in a controlled setting have made studying the issue hugely difficult, Quinn said.
“The cloudiness and the haze issues are probably the ones we know the least about,” he said. “We know it's doing something. We can see it in the fields. It's just really challenging to quantify exactly how much it's doing.”
As far as Clint Orr is concerned, it isn’t doing much to his crops. The Clinton County farmer said he remembers experiencing smoke-filled days a few years ago. When harvest rolled around, the haze didn’t impact his yields one way or the other, he explained.
“I feel like that's probably where this this summer will land also,” Orr said. “I think the effect on crop yields will be pretty negligible.”
More worrisome, he said, are the extreme weather events and boiling heat caused by climate change that make growing a healthy crop a little more difficult every year. A case in point: July 4 was likely the hottest day on Earth since records began.
“You hear that and it kind of tends to put the issue a little bit more on the front burner,” he said.
Still, Orr isn’t completely unconcerned about increasing smoke events. It isn’t doing much now, he argued, but the lack of scientific research doesn’t prove that assumption one way or the other.
“It kind of goes back to that fear of the unknown,” Orr said. “If you don't know how it's going to impact things, then it does kind of heighten those concerns for sure.”
Source: heraldbulletin.com
Photo Credit: ministry-of-natural-resources
Categories: Indiana, Sustainable Agriculture, Weather