Purdue leading USDA on climate change project
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Purdue University announced Thursday it is leading a $1.5 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Midwest Climate hub. The university said the partners will work to help farmers and landowners learn what practices will help them elude the worst effects of climate change.
Purdue said the project, Integrated Midwest Partnerships for Actionable Climate Tools and Training, or IMPACT2, will complement its $10 million Diverse Corn Belt Project, which is exploring how diversifying crop production will make farms more resilient to climate change.
“Projections show that corn won’t do as well in a changing climate,” said IMPACT2 co-leader Linda Prokopy, head of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture in Purdue’s College of Agriculture. “It doesn’t yield as well as temperatures increase.”
Officials with the project say while agriculture can adapt to the currently changing climate, the long-term issue is figuring out how to limit further problems.
“We call that the mitigation part,” said Dennis Todey, IMPACT2 co-leader and director of the USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub. “Agriculture has an ability to sequester greenhouse gases to make itself further resilient to coming climate changes. How then do we prepare for, help mitigate and reduce some of the potential longer-term issues?”
Prokopy said a major goal of the project is to not only focusing on the long-term issues but addressing them in diverse types of farming for all types of farmers, including long-time and beginner farmers operating large or small farms.
“Historically, the USDA and others working in agriculture have focused their efforts on conventional row-crop farmers, but there are numerous types of farmers out there that we need to work with, including urban farmers and small-scale horticultural farmers,” Prokopy said.
As part of the project, the team plans to use an online portal to reach at least 2,000 stakeholders and provide training to at least 500 farmer producers and landowners.
Purdue is also partnering on the project with Iowa State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
UNL’s National Drought Mitigation Center has developed scenarios that help people prepare for climate extremes such as drought, and Purdue said that will be a big part of the project.
“We’ll modify their drought scenarios looking more broadly at climate-change impacts,” Prokopy said. “Precipitation is expected to increase in the Midwest, but timing and amounts are likely to change, which could lead to more regular spring planting delays and drier mid-summer issues.”
The university did not provide a timeline for the project’s completion.