More than any other industry, agriculture is affected by the weather.
And more than almost any other industry, farming will be affected by climate change.
However, figuring out exactly how that will affect the practical business of seeding, managing and harvesting crops isn’t easy for farmers.
“I’m a subscriber to the science of (climate change), but I’m always very skeptical of the hysteria of climate change,” farmer Grant Dyck told the Fields on Wheels conference Oct. 22.
The annual Canadian grain logistics conference focused on the potential impact of climate change over the next 30 to 50 years, with speakers from railways, ports, marketing firms and other parts of the system giving their best guesses about what impacts could occur.
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Climate change could lead to the western Prairies becoming arid and a harsher environment for crops, while the eastern Prairies could become more like the northern corn belt, speakers said.
Railways will have to analyze whether once-in-centuries weather events, such as flooding of the past few years across the Prairies, are becoming more frequent.
Ports will have to figure out if the cities in which they operate might be flooded as ocean levels rise.
How will the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway system be affected by the multiple impacts of climate change, considering its reliance on adequate water levels to move grain?
How safe will the rail line to Churchill be, with its reliance on permafrost-supported tracks?
Some speakers said the industry is already grappling with early impacts of climate change, such as the Great Lakes no longer being covered by ice for most of the winter.
Steve Whitney, commodity shipping manager with Canadian Pacific Railway, said forecasting rail requirements for each crop year is already difficult because weather can radically affect production.
His company uses five- and 10-year averages as a baseline but must deal with situations such as droughts or suddenly larger crops as they arise.
Particularly challenging are events such as the massive flooding in the Rockies and down the Bow River this summer, which disrupted railways in many places.
It was described as a once-in-150-years flood, but logistics operators are wondering if extreme events are going to happen more often.
“It won’t be another century and a half before we experience those kinds of things again,” said Whitney.
He said weather volatility will have unpredictable impacts, and perhaps the big crops this summer are the better side of the instability that caused the western flooding.
“It would be great to see if some of that volatility produced more crops like this,” said Whitney.
