COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio farmers may be praying for a break from the rain.

What You Need To Know

  • Recent years have been some of the wettest on record

  • Too much rain may cause problems for harvest and even create detrimental effects on the environment

  • Farmers are learning how to adapt to climate change

Spectrum News 1 anchor Chuck Ringwalt spoke with agriculture expert Andy Vance as a part of the series, "Climate Change: Beyond the Tipping Point."

Ringwalt:

"Andy, first, can you break down just how much rain farmers have dealt with throughout the last few years?"

Vance:

"Yeah, I was looking at some data compiled by the Ohio State University's College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and over the past four decades, our winters have been warming twice as fast as our summers. And one of the kind of outputs of that is there's been more rainfall, so if you look at the last decade, Ohio State says 2010 to 2020 was the wettest decade on record. And on average, our annual rainfall has been increasing five to 15% since the early 1900s, so we've just gotten a lot more rain on top of having warmer winters than average. And in there is definitely an aspect of too much of a good thing in some parts of the state.

"Now, that said, this growing season, you know, it feels like it's been one of the better growing seasons in recent memory, but the volatility of the weather, you know, if you look at the last week of September, we were something like 500% of normal in terms of average rainfall across the Midwest. It's that variability and variation and extreme weather events that come along with this just general trend of up and to the right and more rain, more rain, more rain."

Ringwalt:

"And then second, we know that phosphorus runoff is a major issue in Ohio, eventually creating algal blooms in our waterways. The biggest being Lake Erie, so can you explain how the heavy rain farmers experience contributes to that?"

Vance:

"Yeah, it's a real challenge. And one of the things farmers have been working on for years now is doing a better job of keeping nutrients like phosphorus on the soil. It doesn't do a farmer any good to buy fertilizer, which is extremely expensive right now and has been, you know, increasing in cost, as have all inputs for food and crop production. It doesn't do you any good to apply fertilizer to a field and then have it wash off because of a big rain event.

"So we're having to do a better job of timing applications of using different application technology to get the nutrient into the soil instead of just, you know, broadcast on top of the soil, you know, for applying manure from, say a hog or dairy farm. We're trying to inject that into the soil, so that way it's not running off in case of these heavy rain events, so we're using timing, technology and trying to be more precise as well. A lot of the GPS-driven precision technologies  [are] allowing farmers to apply just the right amount of nutrient to the soil at just the right location, using some of those advance precision-type technologies."

Ringwalt:

"And you talked about a few things there. If you could, elaborate. What else is being done to adapt to climate change and adapt to the intense rainfall that we're seeing?"

Vance:

"Well, I think one of the first things we have to do is recognize that it's a problem. I think for too long we've been content to say, 'Oh, you know, this really isn't the problem that we think it is.' And we also need to think about, Chuck, we're talking about too much rain in Ohio, but half the country right now is in drought, so we could be looking west of the Mississippi River and telling the exact opposite story. You know, if you look at some of the places like in California. [There's] extreme drought and dryness. That's really affecting agriculture, so, you know, that that dual-edged sword of climate change is a reality, so that's the first thing.

"The other thing is farmers are continuing to use these new technologies and innovations to do a better job of adapting to climate. Maybe that's using new genetics or advanced more drought resistant genetics or water-resistant, water-tolerant genetics so that the corn and soybeans and other crops that we're planning can sustain these variations and variability in wild swings in the climate, so all of those things are at work in the farmer's toolbox. The amount of science and technology that's being deployed in our fields to combat climate change is really stunning at times and it's quite impressive the amount of innovation in that space that's going to work to combat this problem."