Climate Change Is Already Shocking Our Food Chain
Record heat and drought is forcing producers to adopt new business models to survive changing weather patterns.
Stuart Woolf on his farm in Huron, Calif. New climate, new business plan.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergStuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California — about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but razing the land was a necessary triage — “Like cutting off your horribly infected hand to keep the rest of the body going,” he told me.
Woolf plans to replace the trees with cover crops he’ll neither sell nor harvest, but will use to sequester greenhouse gasses in his soil. He’s setting aside other land for another kind of farming: industrial solar.