WE WILL ALL BECOME FARMERS THEN

In late summer a generation hence, a week-long high-pressure system descends over mid-continent America sending temperatures soaring above 115 degrees across much of the Plains, Midwest, and Southwestern states. The heat is so intense and relentless that it kills a majority of the grain crops from Texas to the Dakotas as plant enzymes begin to denature (breakdown). A food crisis ensues, the likes not witnessed in the Americas for at least 500 years.

We will all become farmers then.

Anthropomorphic climate change is with us, regardless what the politicians say on the stump. We have yet to feel the full brunt this new climate’s increasingly powerful punch. While much of the focus in the media dwells on super storms and projected sea level rise, America’s breadbasket, fully in the cross-hairs of climate unrest, is the story that may affect everyone sooner and more dramatically than we care to contemplate.

Imagine a 50 percent decline in the harvest of corn, wheat, and soybeans across the Midwest and Plains states in a single year 25 years from now, when the United States must feed a population of 400 million souls. Middle America wilts under sweltering heat and drought, and crop after crop wilts to dust under the baking skies.

We will all become farmers then.

In several corners of the world now, grain yields are declining for lack of water due to desertification, rapid depletion of underground aquifers, reduction in snowmelt (and therefore river volume for irrigation) from mountain glaciers, and monsoon cycle perturbations. This trend is likely to be exacerbated in the decades to come.

We will all become farmers then.

There is a common adage that states, “We are nine meals from anarchy.” Hunger is an explosive. High food prices due to crop shortages begets revolution. Think the French Revolution. Think the current Syrian civil war. Think the Horn of Africa. If food staple prices were to double on the heels of a massive crop failure in the United States, triggered by water stress and exceptional high temperatures over mid-continent, can you fathom the extent of the unrest that would sweep this country, a nation sporting as many firearms as citizens.

We will all become farmers then.

As climate change magnifies, as the nation continues to heats up, and as the struggle for control of water resources intensifies, how we farm, where we farm, and even what we eat will have to undergo rapid change. We will be forced to increase local agricultural activity and in every human environment: in the cities, the suburbs, the ex-urbs, an in rural areas where myriad family farm once thrived but which now produce little because few people still work the land today.

We will all become farmers then.

Rather than have 80 percent of our foodstuffs produced by just 250,000 individual people as is the case in 2016, our changing climate will mandate that millions of our citizens turn to growing food in everything from quarter-acre house lots, to rooftops, to greenhouse banks set up in abandoned shopping malls, to, well, everywhere. As the Plains and great swaths of the Midwest and Southwest bake under hotter and hotter skies, food production will be forced into every other corner of the nation.

We will all become farmers then.