American Agriculture Hugely Vulnerable To Climate Breakdown, But Banks Weirdly Unconcerned So Far
Since the early 1980s, Dale Murden has grown citrus in the tip of southern Texas, where the Rio Grande winds through a sun-baked floodplain across the border into Mexico. Murden cruises his groves in a John Deere Gator, often accompanied by Blue and Blanca—his “wonder rescue” dogs, as he calls them—past trees he planted years ago. They are just old grapefruit trees, but over the last year they have become battle-tested companions. They’ve put up a “heckuva fight,” he says.
Last summer, Murden watched as the trees struggled against a massive drought that withered leaves and fruits. Then a hurricane drove thousands of grapefruits to the ground, where they bobbed, unripe and green, in giant muddy puddles. After a freak deep freeze in February, Murden found drifts of nearly-ripe fruit laying useless on the ground, under canopies of browned leaves and frost-split branches. “I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, and I’ve lived through hurricanes, freezes and droughts,” Murden said. “But never in my life have I experienced all three in one year.”
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In the spring of 2019, torrential rains deluged farms across the Midwest, making it impossible for farmers to plant their crops. Later that year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that nearly 70 percent of banks’ farm customers were affected by the flooding and that more farmers were having trouble paying back their loans than at any point in the previous 20 years.
Regional agricultural banks and lenders within the Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored network of lending cooperatives, provide most of the credit to American farmers, more than $400 billion in 2019. But these banks have done little to no assessment of climate risks, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), even though the huge losses from flooding and other extremes are predicted to become more common. “Lenders could both suffer losses from impaired loans and perhaps be less able to provide credit to borrowers,” the authors wrote. “Despite these risks, there is little evidence of proactive climate risk assessment by U.S. agricultural lenders.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02052021/extreme-weather-agricultural-financial-risks-climate-change/
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