They may not believe in climate change, but climate change believes in them
by David Atkins
I wish I could make myself feel more sympathy for the plight of farmers in the Deep South, but it’s difficult:
Peaches, the gem of the Southern summer, are just not so sweet this year.
The tomatoes in Tennessee are splitting. Tobacco in North Carolina is drowning. And watermelons, which seem as if they would like all the rain that has soaked the South, have taken perhaps the biggest hit of all.
Some watermelon farmers in South Georgia say they have lost half their crop. The melons that did survive are not anywhere as good as a Southern watermelon ought to be.
“They are awful,” said Daisha Frost, 39, who works in Decatur, Ga. “And this is the time of year when they should be the bomb.”
Day after day, the rains have come to a part of the country that relies on the hot summer sun for everything from backyard-tomato sandwiches to billions of dollars in commercial row crops, fruit and peanuts.
While the contiguous United States as a whole is about only 6 percent above its normal rainfall this year, Southern states are swamped. Through June, Georgia was 34 percent above normal, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. Both South Carolina and North Carolina were about 25 percent above normal. Alabama’s rainfall was up 22 percent.
The weather is a particular shock because more than two-thirds of the region was abnormally dry or suffering a drought last year.
Although the total cost to farmers has yet to be tallied, agricultural officials in several states in the Deep South predict severe losses this year that could be in the billions of dollars.
“Nobody’s ever seen it this wet this long,” said Randy Ellis, a Georgia farmer who grows wheat and watermelons, the latter of which end up at East Coast grocery stores.
He usually he pulls about 60,000 pounds of melons from an acre of land. This year, he said, he barely got 30,000 pounds. What is worse, the cooler, rainy weather meant the crop was ready after the important Fourth of July window, when prices are at their peak.
Standing water has made cornfields look like rice paddies in some parts of the rural South. Mold is growing on ears of corn, and in some fields entire stalls have toppled. Late blight, a fungus-like pathogen, is creeping into tomato fields early and with unusual vigor.
This is what climate change does. It’s not just warming. It’s extreme and unusual weather patterns. And it’s only going to get worse.
One would hope that even the Deep South wakes up and realizes that whatever ideological reasons they might have to protect the oil industry, they’re not worth the cost.
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