Moving the Breadbasket: Climate Change and the Future of American Agriculture

As temperatures rise, storms become more severe, and rainfall patterns grow increasingly unpredictable, the agricultural systems that feed our world are under threat. This is particularly evident in California. The state is a leading producer of almost every fruit, vegetable, nut and grain consumed in the United States. However, as climate change intensifies, the heavy reliance on California for the bulk of the nation's produce becomes a gamble.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is attempting to address this issue by proactively promoting the cultivation of crops that may not remain viable in California's future climate in the Mid-Mississippi Delta region — encompassing parts of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. The project, called Next California, seeks to support and scale a sustainable specialty crop industry through research, pilots and partnerships.

“The original impetus of this project was avoiding land conversion,” said Julia Kurnik, WWF’s senior director of innovation startups. “We aren’t trying to take anything from California, but agriculture will have to shift somewhere. Left to shift on its own, we are fearful that it would move to areas that would involve land conversion, which has a huge environmental impact. If we can switch to current farmland, it is a big sustainability win for everyone.”

The Mid-Mississippi Delta region offers other advantages as a new agricultural hub, with a strong logistics sector and fairly abundant water resources. By transitioning some of California's crop production to this region, WWF aims to mitigate the risks associated with climate change and ensure the stability of the U.S. food supply. 

But a transition to new agricultural regions is not simple. Farmers in the Delta will need to adapt to new crops and cultivation techniques, requiring substantial investment in education, infrastructure and technology. "The program is still early on in its implementation phase, so there is no clearly defined way to say 'this is how we do this,'" Kurnik noted.

WWF partnered with the University of Arkansas to research the needs of a major agricultural transition, such as crop inputs, labor requirements, the environmental footprint of the project, and the potential to implement various types of business models and understand the market as a whole. 

WWF also launched a pilot to help grow crop farms in the region. “The pilot itself consists of five farms, currently,” Kurnik said. “We want to support and scale existing efforts on the ground to show what is possible here. We want to provide farmers with information, not tell them to grow a specific crop. We are connecting farmers to buyers, de-risking and scaling up.”

The project, as well as the agricultural sector in the region, is not without hurdles. Labor is the largest challenge. As Mid-Delta farmers switch from highly-mechanized commodity row crops to specialty crops, their need for labor is growing. Specialty crop farmers also lack the data needed to access financial tools.

“On the lending and market side, if you are looking at community banks and lenders in the regions who give operating loans to farmers, they just don’t have information on specialty crops: no data, no history and no way to judge risk,” Kurnik said. “We have buyers who have never sourced from the Delta and don’t know how to judge risks or determine seasonality. We have to address these hurdles by working with partners.” 

Transitioning a part of the agricultural sector carries an environmental risk for the region, too. Agriculture accounts for approximately 40 percent of California’s total water use, and recent years have seen groundwater wells run dry as the water levels in aquifers plummet. 

“We still need to be doing work on this, because it is not a finished question,” Kurnik said when asked how WWF is ensuring the protection of the aquifers in the Mid-Mississippi Delta region. “We will probably have to consider policy, but we haven’t gotten there yet … A lot of the cropland [in the region] can use rainwater as opposed to groundwater. It is less controllable, so it brings additional risks, but it is already being done. We are also working with land grant universities and the University of Arkansas to get a detailed survey county by county and drill down into the details to know what can be best grown in the regions with their specific soil and water.”

Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of this initiative are significant. Diversifying the geographic distribution of crop production reduces the vulnerability of the U.S. food supply to climate change and creates new economic opportunities for farmers in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. 

“Everywhere in the world will see an increase in disruptive weather events, which will inherently make farming riskier,” Kurnik said. “Growing a diversity of crops helps with that because if you have more growing seasons and a variety of crops in the ground, they will be affected differently ... If you are a rice farmer who only plants in April and harvests in October, you face a lot of risk if something happens to that one crop.”

There could also be potential to scale this project in different regions of the world. “One thing we have discussed from the beginning is that we have felt that this problem is not unique to the U.S.,” Kurnik said. “Different countries and regions of the world have their own Californias and the shifting of food sourcing is going to be a continually changing problem globally … What we grow all over the world is shifting and it is important to think proactively to avoid economic devastation to areas that lose farming communities, or that see major land conversion and vastly disrupted food supply chains.” 

For now, WWF is keeping its focus on the Mid-Mississippi Delta region. This year, as Next California moves from the planning and research phase into action and implementation, the organization is beginning to hand over responsibilities to its on-the-ground organizational partners, Kurnik said. “To succeed in the long-term, it has to be stakeholders in the region making major decisions.”