![]() Clay says he is experiencing the impacts himself. “Prices have gone sky-high and all this is getting passed on to consumers,” he said. Sam Clay of Toyo Cotton Company, a Dallas trader that buys upland cotton from farmers and sells it to mills, said the collapse of the crop had sent him scrambling. “That’s why cotton really stands out, with this drought having such a big impact on the national crop,” Mr. While other crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are affected by extreme weather, they are spread out geographically so that a major event afflicting some of the crop may spare the rest, said Lance Honig, an economist at the Agriculture Department. ![]() That’s unusual for a major commodity crop. In the United States, most cotton grown is upland cotton, and the crop is concentrated in Texas. Climate change is projected to increase the duration and intensity of drought over much of the Ogallala region in the next 50 years, the report said. But now, with the rise in heat and drought and the decline of the aquifer, those dust storms are returning, the National Climate Assessment found. In the years since, the farmland over the Ogallala once again flourished as farmers drew from the aquifer to irrigate their fields. “But we have to figure out how to keep that from happening again.” “The last time this happened there was a mass migration of producers from where they couldn’t survive any longer to a place where they were going to give it a shot,” Mr. Lately, the novel has been weighing on the mind of Mark Brusberg, a meteorologist at the Agriculture Department. John Steinbeck famously chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about a family of cotton farmers driven from their Oklahoma home. That is the same region that was abandoned by more than two million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor farming practices. “Major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer should now be considered a nonrenewable resource,” it said. It’s an example of how climate change is reshaping the cost of daily life in ways that consumers might not realize.įor decades, the Southwestern cotton crop has depended on water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches underneath eight western states from Wyoming to Texas.īut the Ogallala is declining, in part because of climate change, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a report issued by 13 federal agencies. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5 percent in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsenIQ and The NPD Group. Cotton balls climbed 9 percent and gauze bandages increased by 8 percent. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21 percent. That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13 percent over the past year. In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops - nearly six million acres - because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change. When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |