Climate and Agriculture: Opportunities for Midwestern Agriculture

Climate impacts agriculture both directly and indirectly and the impacts of these effects create economic, production, and quality losses for agricultural systems across the Midwest. Variation in production of commodity and specialty crops demonstrates the impacts of variation in seasonal weather. The climate is changing and the implications are that production will become more variable; however, that creates an opportunity for increasing the diversity of cropping systems across the Midwest.  Our challenge becomes on how to preserve our natural resources while increasing production with climate change.

 

Dr. Jerry L. Hatfield is the Laboratory Director of the USDA-ARS National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment and Director of the Midwest Climate Hub in Ames, Iowa, and co-PI on the Agriculture Model Improvement and Intercomparison Project.  His research focuses on quantifying the interactions among the components of the soil-plant-atmosphere system to quantify resilience of cropping systems to climate change and development of techniques to enhance decision-making for agriculture. He is the author of 423 refereed publications and 16 monographs, recipient of numerous awards, and elected to the ARS Hall of Fame in 2014 for his research on improving agriculture and environmental quality.

 

The SENR Spring 2016 Seminar begins at 4:10 p.m. in 164 Howlett Hall. CarmenConnect into 123 Williams Hall will be made available.