Bishop Hill Wheat in India
Jan 29, 2012 Climate: WG2 New Scientist has a very strange report about an article published in Nature Reports Climate Change. It's about what it calls "premature ageing" in wheat in India.
Satellite images of northern India have revealed that extreme temperatures are cutting wheat yields. What's more, models used to predict the effects of global warming on food supply may have underestimated the problem by a third.
Golly. Sounds serious, doesn't it?
But wait a moment. A satellite image is bit of an odd way to measure grain yields, isn't it? I had always thought dear old-fashioned scales and weighbridges were quite an acceptable way of doing this kind of thing. Let's take a look at how this tech-based approach to measuring grain yields works:
David Lobell of Stanford University in California used nine years of images from the MODIS Earth-observation satellite to track when wheat in this region turned from green to brown, a sign that the grain is no longer growing.
He found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher, with spells over 34 ºC having a particularly strong effect. He then inferred yield loss, using previous field studies as a guide.
I'm not quite sure how you tell a crop that has yield problems from one that is merely ripening a bit earlier - I'm also not sure about the distinction between "premature ageing" and early ripening.
Another question that occurs is whether Prof Lobell has sense-checked his findings. I mean, how about this headline from the Times of India?
Highest-ever wheat yield may rot away
The reason it's going to rot away is lack of storage. Now there are all sorts of other factor that might affect the size of the harvest - the acreage given over to wheat being an obvious one. Another possibility is the introduction of new varieties and I wonder if he has controlled for this.
Without access to the paper it's hard to say more, but the idea that the warming of recent decades has affected yields seems on the face of it somewhat implausible.
Reader Comments (78)
"He found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher, with spells over 34 ºC having a particularly strong effect. He then inferred yield loss, using previous field studies as a guide."
But we know from the actual wheat production figures at Index Mundi" that yields have been growing steadily for the last 50 years.
Might it be, then, that there are fewer spells with temperatures over 34 ºC?
"He found that the wheat turned brown earlier when average temperatures were higher"
That would be the sunshine, I expect...
Really, it is extraordinary that the author of this study didn't feel the need to consult the actual production figures, given that these are available to all via a simple Google search.
I like to keep things simple. If a problem that might affect billions of people all over India is deemed by the Editors of Nature to be less important than Nature Publishing Group earning a few bucks, well, I get the message, thank you very much, the article related to that problem is evidently not worth much, monetarily or otherwise.
oops..millions not billions. Apologies for having had a "Sagan" moment!
@James P
"Divide by 10,000 to get tonnes/hectare and the figures are far more digestible."
Yep, and dump the insignificants. 1 Hg/Ha indeed!
Have they stumbled over a daylength-insensitive wheat that isn't so daylength-insensitive as advertised?
@Filbert Cobb
We don't often get wheat quality discussions over here, do we :-) Depends what you mean by breadmaking - the stuff in plastic bags can be made from poor quality wheat - the Chorleywood process used was introduced shortly after WWII to use the (then) second-rate UK wheat because we were so bankrupted we couldn't afford higher quality imports. People still buy it and it dominates the market, which means that there's little premium in growing the good stuff, which we easily can now because of genetic improvements and vastly improved crop production methods. The current premium for milling wheat of about 7% (£10-15/tonne) over 'feed' wheat means that the yield penalty of growing really good stuff (which isn't much at all these days) only needs to be a few dozen kg/ha to make the premium not worth chasing.
Some definitions I can remember from my remote sensing courses (... and lectures)
Remote Sensing is:
* advanced coloring.
* the most expensive way to make a picture.
* seeing what can’t be seen, then convincing someone that you’re right.
* the art of dividing up the world into little multicolored squares and then playing computer games with them to release unbelievable potential that’s always just out of reach.
* astronomy in the wrong direction.
In SE Australia wheat crops are maturing roughly 2 to 3 weeks earlier than they did some 50 years ago.
Secondly, the plant breeders who are ultimately responsible for seeing that 7 billion humans can be fed and fed adequately and who are surely the most important but most neglected and least recognised and most under rated scientists ever, are creating varieties that turn from a strong green colour to a ripe brown colour ; ie; they ripen, in about half the time or less than the varieties of only some 30 years ago.
Farmers around the world are now changing crop varieties every couple of years as various crop diseases such as the rusts and other fungal diseases plus insects and bugs of every description morph rapidly into new strains that can overcome the resistance of the older crop varieties.
Each variety of a crop has it's own colouration and reflectivity characteristics from the air and satellite so every time a farmer changes a variety , the colour changes are different as are both the pre ripening and the post ripening colours.
The newest varieties of crops are maturing faster, yielding more, much more on the same amount of water and fertilizer, can stand much greater destructive to both crop and quality, wind and rain and to some extent frost, at the critical flowering and seed set periods.
The real problem of the future may yet be one created by the global warming cultists and their running dogs in the fundamentalist green movement.
So heavy has been the pressure on all science re the so called Global Warming and the supposed catastrophic outcomes that crop plant breeders for the last decade [ it takes at least a decade of plant breeding and selection to create a new and better variety of the world's main grain crops ] have been industriously breeding crops suitable for much warmer climates ahead.
Breeding for a colder climate is just off the program, all reinforced by the national science funding bodies here in Australia who at one stage [ and possibly still do ! ] refused to give any grants to researchers unless something about fighting or mitigating global warming was included in the grant application
IF we instead run into a period of falling global temperatures and shorter seasons, the new and even much older varieties will have far less adaptability to the colder conditions plus a much higher vulnerability to cold temperatures due to being bred for "modelled and predicted " warm to hot growing conditions.
World grain yields could at best stabilise for a decade until new cold adapted varieties come on stream or much worse, grain yields could actually fall as both crop vulnerability to cold growing seasons plus the loss of land in the far northern grain growing areas due to too short a growing seasons and a too cold climate.
And this with a global population now past 7 billion and still increasing.
The global warming scientists and their cultist off shoots and the crazy green fundamentalists may yet be morally responsible for the death of thousands or much, much worse if global cooling moves rapidly on stage. The world's farmers just do not have the crops varieties and tools to keep on increasing crop yields in a cold Maunder or Dalton Minimum type climate world.
On the satellites, it is a fundamental requirement that any research on plants and crops as observed by satellites MUST be ground truthed to verify the satellites data output.
Failure to do so has led to fields of rocks and sand and etc being identified as crops of many types or at least they were until a rather embarrassed group of closeted researchers were informed that what they thought were crops were actually something entirely different.
@ROM
Much well said about the insane emphasis on breeding for a warmer climate, but I'm not going to go into catastrophist mode about grain supplies as yet - we always have the option of diverting grain from animals to humans if we get short of calories, and also of switching to eating a more resilient crop than wheat in extremis - barley is good for you even when it's not malted first... :-)
Just for fun:
graphical correlation between GISS global temperature anomaly and cereal yield per Ha in India:
SNTF
I reckon if the climate goes belly-up the only way to guarantee food supplies is going to be (whisper it) GM! That'll be a fun battle.
Just for fun:
graphical correlation between GISS global temperature anomaly and cereal yield per Ha in India:
The blog is a bit picky with urls today, so I will try with the figure link in disguise: tinyurl.com/7q2o9jl
From Wikipedia, "Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind".
@SayNoToFearmongers
The term "Chorleywood Bread-making Process" is oxymoronic. It does allow pig-quality wheat to be made into human-edible wraps for cheese slices, bacon, Spam etc., so that we can eat same without a fork and to prevent greasy fingers. Barley and oat breads are good, too, if a little dense.
@ROM
Yes - the lack of public appreciation for plant sciences in general, and plant breeding in particular, from a public with its mouth full and the time/energy/money to fret about the angels on the point of an imaginary pin is very tiresome. On the existence of cold-tolerant wheat - I'm confident the Scandiwegians, and Canadians will have gene-banks, if not existing cultivars, with wheat of sufficient winter-hardiness to cope with lower temperatures in the wheat-growing zones for a long while to come. The Russians might have, if they haven't sold off the N I Vavilov facility for housing or car-parking.
Thanks to TerryS for this real world data
2000 = 76369 7.90 %
2001 = 69680 -8.76 %
2002 = 72770 4.43 %
2003 = 65760 -9.63 %
2004 = 72150 9.72 %
2005 = 68640 -4.86 %
2006 = 69350 1.03 %
2007 = 75810 9.32 %
2008 = 78570 3.64 %
2009 = 80680 2.69 %
2010 = 80800 0.15 %
Now Richard (Betts) please explain which is correct, Prof Lobell's "inferred loss" model, or the real-world data?
Patagon
Shirley u mean Astrology in the wrong direction?
I have a farm in Northern Indiana, USA. This year we experienced a wet spring, followed by a very warm and dry summer. While corn and soy yields suffered somewhat, my wheat yields tied for the highest in the past twenty years. I suspect the early browning of the fields would have suggested a loss of yields by the logic used in this study.
Indian Punjabi wheat yields for 1999/2000 to 2009/2010:
http://eands.dacnet.nic.in/At_Glance_2010/4.1.6.xls
4400 kg/hectare was expected for 2010/2011.
The 1999/2000 yield was an all-time high for the Indian Punjab. After a dip in the mid-2000s, yields are climbing back towards the maximum.
A paper published at the end of the dip ('India’s Agrarian Crisis and Smallholder Producers’ Participation in New Farm Supply Chain Initiatives: A Case Study of Contract Farming', Sharma, 2007) said that the declining yields were due to increasing soil salinity and other harmful consequences of the intensive rice-wheat duoculture practised in the region (a system that enables the Punjab to have wheat yields that are twice the Indian average) but the subsequent recovery suggests that something else was going on.
"Trouble with these fellows is" he said, "that none of them knows the first thing about India! Not the first thing!"
Colonel Easterbrook's plaint about political analysis in The Times, in Agatha Christie's 1950 novel seems to have survived.
(A Murder is Announced, a Miss Marple, for those who are interested).
"The reason it's going to rot away is lack of storage."
Isn't that the reason that Jones deleted the raw data?
@ Filbert Cobb
Yes, the cold tolerant crop genes so far identified are all in the world's crop gene banks and are available on a few days notice to crop breeders around the world.
There is a quiet and almost unknown system of information exchange and plant gene and seed exchange amongst the world's crop plant breeders and researchers.
A lot of this interchange of genes and etc is carried out despite political tensions between countries and sometimes despite outright enmity between nations as well as having to sometimes very quietly circumvent or find a way through various national customs and plant import / export restrictions that have ben drawn up without thought as to the consequences of restricting the ability to swap genes and plant material for crop breeding purposes..
Most of the very limited number of the world's crop plant breeders and the national gene bank curators that are responsible for the world's crop gene banks know one another, often personally through their annual get togethers around the world or even if only by internet contact over many years so the process of finding and despatching a request for a 2 or 3 seeds out of a plant seed gene bank from a particular plant cultivar with the genetic characteristics required by a plant breeder on the otherside of the world is readily done with few questions.
However this is only the start of a maybe at least a ten year long breeding process to finally get a crop plant variety that will, say, incorporate the cold tolerant genes from a cold climate variety, be resistant to the latest strains of rust and other fungal diseases of crops, be resistant to say, the insect pests, be tolerant of most chemicals used for weed and disease control, have the growth characteristics that suit the climate, day length and temperature regime, be adapted to the soil type in a region and as tolerant as feasible of excesses in the soil of various elements or the lack of those elements, will not shatter in winds and dump all it's seed onto the ground before being harvested but still be easy to thresh, will stand in strong winds and not lodge, will have a high harvest index ie; as much grain as possible compared to the amount of straw and chaff on each plant, is very even in both growth through the season and in growth height for efficient harvesting, have an even grain size and finally has the quality and protein levels that meets the needs of the buyers whether for bread flour, pasta, starch production , biscuits, each of which requires certain quality characteristics and then there is animal feed grain varieties as well and finally a better yield than other previous varieties and that without increasing the farmers costs and inputs.
Each of these characteristics is gene based and the characteristics must be selected from tens of thousands of other crop plants varieties listed and held in the world's seed banks by the breeder who then spends years cross breeding and selecting until he gets the plants with the characteristic he is looking for
And then that variety unless it is, one of those very rare examples , will only be viable in a limited regional area. Soil types and local climate place severe limitations on where crop varieties can be used so to imagine that a Canadian variety could be used in say Australia if the global temperatures cooled drastically is simply not reality.
Here where I am in SE Australia we can't even grow most crop varieties from the northern parts of the state of Victoria in the southern part of the same state due to soil and changed climatic conditions and this in only some 400 kms distance and that is quite common through out the grain belts of the world.
Crop varieties have to be bred for the regions in which they will be produced and that means IF there is a significant and fast change in the climate of the future, then a lot of food crop varieties will no longer be viable from a growth, quality and production aspect.
Then there will be the ten / fourteen year lag until new and adapted varieties come on stream.
@ Filbert Cobb
Yes, the cold tolerant crop genes so far identified are all in the world's crop gene banks and are available on a few days notice to crop breeders around the world.
There is a quiet and almost unknown system of information exchange and plant gene and seed exchange amongst the world's crop plant breeders and researchers.
A lot of this interchange of genes and etc is carried out despite political tensions between countries and sometimes despite outright enmity between nations as well as having to sometimes very quietly circumvent or find a way through various national customs and plant import / export restrictions that have ben drawn up without thought as to the consequences of restricting the ability to swap genes and plant material for crop breeding purposes..
Most of the very limited number of the world's crop plant breeders and the national gene bank curators that are responsible for the world's crop gene banks know one another, often personally through their annual get togethers around the world or even if only by internet contact over many years so the process of finding and despatching a request for a 2 or 3 seeds out of a plant seed gene bank from a particular plant cultivar with the genetic characteristics required by a plant breeder on the otherside of the world is readily done with few questions.
However this is only the start of a maybe at least a ten year long breeding process to finally get a crop plant variety that will, say, incorporate the cold tolerant genes from a cold climate variety, be resistant to the latest strains of rust and other fungal diseases of crops, be resistant to say, the insect pests, be tolerant of most chemicals used for weed and disease control, have the growth characteristics that suit the climate, day length and temperature regime, be adapted to the soil type in a region and as tolerant as feasible of excesses in the soil of various elements or the lack of those elements, will not shatter in winds and dump all it's seed onto the ground before being harvested but still be easy to thresh, will stand in strong winds and not lodge, will have a high harvest index ie; as much grain as possible compared to the amount of straw and chaff on each plant, is very even in both growth through the season and in growth height for efficient harvesting, have an even grain size and finally has the quality and protein levels that meets the needs of the buyers whether for bread flour, pasta, starch production , biscuits and etc, each of which requires certain strict quality characteristics and then there is animal feed grain varieties as well and finally a better yield to make it worth while for farmers to grow than other previous varieties and that without increasing the farmers costs and inputs.
Each of these characteristics is gene based and the characteristics must be selected from tens of thousands of other crop plants varieties listed and held in the world's seed banks by the breeder who then spends years cross breeding and selecting until he gets the plants with the characteristic he is looking for
And then that variety unless it is, one of those very rare examples , will only be viable in a limited regional area. Soil types and local climate place severe limitations on where crop varieties can be used so to imagine that a Canadian variety could be used in say Australia if the global temperatures cooled drastically is simply not reality.
Here where I am in SE Australia we can't even grow most crop varieties from the northern parts of the state of Victoria in the southern part of the same state due to soil and changed climatic conditions and this in only some 400 kms distance and that is quite common through out the grain belts of the world.
Crop varieties have to be bred for the regions in which they will be produced and that means IF there is a significant and fast change in the climate of the future, then a lot of food crop varieties will no longer be viable from a growth, quality and production aspect.
Then there will be the ten / fourteen year lag until new and adapted varieties come on stream.
This has been a very educational and entertaining thread to read. Kudos to all commenters.
ROM is correct in all he says. This is what applies in a world with relatively stable conditions which allow global commodity trading. In the event of rapid significant climate change in a downward direction I think it entirely possible that the close control that Big Ag has on the commercialisation of genetic material will be stepped around in the scramble to grow staple foods.
As for wheat rotting because there is insufficient storage: dry grain below 14-15% moisture is stable, but grain storage insect pests respire and produce water vapour - which allows fungi to grow, and off it all goes. Solution - get the surplus out there and into mouths instead of hoarding in silos waiting for prices to harden. Quick, before some rabid activists start blaming Haber, Bosch and Borlaug for the surplus.
Thank you for the updates on seed breeding. They remind me how much things have changed since the Sixties when I started in the grain trade. A few people then were concerned about mutant strains of wheat from deliberate irradiation but memory of food rationing was a fairly recent memory and there was not the same sort of anti-scientific panic as today.
There was one dramatic incident in the Seventies. Very severe frost destroyed all the Soviet Union's autumn-sown wheat crop in 1972. We didn't know about it until the following year when we woke up one morning and found there was no wheat to be had. The Soviets had conducted a very effective buying raid on the Chicago market. This incident was cited by climate alarmists as evidence of imminent catastrophic global cooling. At least it was something which actually happened.
@Edward Spalton
I remember it well. It was dubbed "The Great Grain Robbery"
The Great Grain Robbery was conducted by the Russians over a period of 5 days in Oct 1972.
I remember it well as it was a few years after I and my wife had started farming on our own.
It followed a period starting in 1968 when grain prices collapsed due to massive overproduction across the world.
Here in Australia we had delivery quotas where we could only deliver and get paid for a portion of our crop production and as regularly seems to happen in agriculture we seemed to be staring down the barrel into a world that seemed to be saying that it no longer needed farmers.
Then came the Russians in Oct 1972.
The world grain surplus was disappearing about that time and we were getting the princely [ sarc] sum of about AUD$64 / tonne for our wheat.
That was on the Friday night of the end of the week when the Russian's went out and bought and bought. Nobody knew they were doing this as there was no internet or rapid and overarching communication systems then, just the telex for commercial transactions.
By the following Wednesday here in Australia, wheat had reached AUD$ 150 / tonne and stayed there for the next 18 months.
That was an extraordinary time as suddenly the farmers had money and the long struggling small and large towns across the Australian grain belt just exploded in wealth and new businesses.
Today with much moaning from customers about high grain prices and the inability of the poor to pay for that high priced grain, here in Australia farmers are today getting around the AUD$ 180 / tonne. for milling quality wheat.
This is where farming is today.
And yet there didn't seem to be a serious problem for the poor back in 1972 paying that extraordinary price in those long gone days of 1972 /3.
Perhaps those who complain about high food prices should try living and operating a business charging mid 1972 prices but paying today's costs and prices for their inputs.
There has been a massive shift of farmers from agriculture in Australia as agriculture here without support or subsidies has become a very precarious economic proposition and a harsh way of making a living, particularly when we see second and third rate academic and bureaucratic and big business position occupants earning 2 and 3 times as much as farmers with no risk, little effort and guaranteed incomes.
Food producers are now amongst those on the lowest rung on western society's social totem pole and the world in it's contempt for the food producers may yet pay a very harsh and traumantic price for it's indifference to global food production and the contempt in the western world for those who actually do the real hard, down to earth food producing, the farmers.