Part Two: TV6 Investigates impact of climate change on UP agriculture - WLUC

Climate change branches out to socio-economic factors like fishing and agriculture, as well.

Part Two: TV6 Investigates impact of climate change on UP agriculture

MARQUETTE, Mich. (WLUC) - TV6 continues to investigate climate change and its impact on Upper Michigan.

In the first part of our investigation, meteorologists with the National Weather Service and researchers at the Superior Watershed Partnership say climate change can be seen across the U.P., including in the temperature of Lake Superior.

They also say climate change branches out to socio-economic factors like fishing and agriculture, as well.

“There’s cultural impacts, as well, and economic impacts to consider,” says Tyler Penrod, program manager at the Superior Watershed Partnership.

When one thing shifts, another moves with it. When rain falls, sun shines and the temperature is just right, plants grow. However, when there’s fluctuation over a great period of time, those who study the environment closely say it can throw off the rhythm.

“Folks around here who live by the lake or recreate by the lake have seen nearly record-high lake levels and nearly-low record lake levels in just the last decade,” Penrod said. “Those kind of fluctuations are totally out of the typical rhythm that we have seen for Lake Superior over the last couple hundred years.”

Penrod says the impacts can be felt beyond the environment, dinging economic and cultural trends.

For example, he says the ice coverage on Lake Superior affects more than our winter weather. It impacts beaches and ecosystems.

“That ice is really a barrier that provides protection against those strong storms,” Penrod says. When it’s not there, it causes a lot of damage that we’ve seen just in the past couple of years.”

One example is a decrease in white fish.

“This year, especially, we had really low ice coverage on Lake Superior and reports that the base of our feed web that supports fish up the chain might suffer from that lack of ice coverage,” Penrod says. “The phytoplankton weren’t producing the numbers that they generally do in the winter. That affects ice fishing up here in the U.P. It affects when game animals migrate for hunters. There are a lot of consequences.”

There’s at least one group who say they’ve found a silver lining, specifically in Upper Michigan: farmers and agricultural researchers like James DeDecker, director of the MSU Upper Peninsula Research and Extension Center in Chatham.

“I like the term ‘climate haven,’” DeDecker says. “When you look at the research that’s been done on climate change and where impacts are going to be less or greater across the United States, Michigan and the Upper Peninsula are very well positioned to function as climate havens where the changes might not be as great or the changes that do happen may not be as detrimental because of the resource base that we are starting with as kind of our foundation.”

DeDecker says that ‘climate haven’ does add to the pros moving forward for the future, between both researchers and farmers alike. However, the concern is still on the plate, from the fields over to the pasture.”

“We’ve seen about, on average, a two-and-a-half degree mean annual temperature increase in Michigan and the Upper Peninsula so things are getting warmer,” DeDecker says. “We’ve added about two to three weeks of frost-free growing season here in Michigan and in the U.P. and that means a lot of opportunities for farmers to grow more crops, to grow a greater diversity of plants and animals that maybe we hadn’t been able to produce as successfully as in the past.”

DeDecker says his ‘case and point’ lies in a term called a ‘hardiness zone.’ According to the USDA, a ‘hardiness zone’ is a geographic area that has a certain average annual minimum temperature in relation to the survival of plants.

“We actually gained anywhere between .5 to two hardiness zone differences here in Michigan so the diversity of crops that we can grow is rapidly expanding and that’s just the mid-1990s until today,” DeDecker says. “Back into the 1990s, we had an average of about 45 field work days available in April and May. In recent years, we’ve been down to 20 or 25 field work days available and it really just comes down to those heavy precip events, erratic precipitation patterns that are keeping us out of the field with more wet days and more of what they call wet-wet days.”

With practices like no-till farming, which focuses on keeping carbon in the soil and not tilling the land to plant crops like forages, DeDecker says as long as there’s state and federal help, Yoopers will find a way to take advantage of the “climate haven” that they have.

“Yoopers are incredibly resilient,” DeDecker says. “We are great at relying on our neighbors and working together to solve problems. I think we’ll be okay but we also need help.”

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