What do Vermonters who make a living from the land think about agroforestry?

The climate in the Northeast U.S. has been changing. Winters have been getting warmer and heavy rainstorms are becoming much more common. See what these changes mean to agriculture in the Northeast.

Many farmers are feeling that seasons have shifted, and weather station data shows this to be true.  The latest climate models suggest that these changes are likely to continue. But there are many actions farmers and forest landowners in the Northeast can take to lessen the impact – or even take advantage of - these climate trends.

Managing your agricultural risk in a changing climate

The AgRisk Viewer provides an accessible and discoverable web platform for crop insurance loss data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA). Data are available from the county to national scale on a monthly to multi-year timestep.

In 2016 alone, over $100 billion worth of crops were insured by the federal crop insurance corporation administered through USDA RMA. This program is essentially a safety net for farmers to mitigate natural perils (e.g., drought) and price decline effects on agricultural production. Data are available from the USDA RMA on insurance payouts, or indemnities. These data also report the specific causes of loss, or reasons for crop loss, that triggered indemnities.

The AgRisk Viewer brings “to life” publicly-available cause of loss data from the USDA RMA. The viewer allows user-defined selection and visualization of several dataset components: spatial resolution (i.e., county-level, state-level, national), temporal resolution (i.e., monthly, annual), time period (1989-2016), cause of loss (e.g., drought, excess moisture, hail, wind, etc.), commodity (e.g., wheat, soybeans, corn, etc.), and variable of interest (e.g., indemnity, acres affected). 

Three outcomes are associated with the development of the AgRisk Viewer:
1.    Increased accessibility, discoverability, and usability of crop insurance loss data by our partners and stakeholders,
2.    Co-creation of research questions and projects using crop loss data to identify those agricultural production risk “hot spots” leading towards targeted adaptation,
3.    Sustained engagement with our USDA sister agencies including the RMA and their regional offices, as well as cooperative extension, land grant universities, commodity groups, and the broader public.

Citation:  Reyes, J. and E. Elias. 2019. Spatio-temporal variation of crop loss in the United States from 2001 to 2016. Environmental Research Letters, 14(7). doi: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab1ac9
 

The Climate Perspectives (CLIMPER) tool allows users to assess how recent weather and climate at a given weather station compares with prior time periods (e.g. days, weeks, months or years) in the climatological record. The daily updated climatological information allows the user to readily assess the extremes of an ongoing weather event, or regime (e.g. exceptionally hot, cold or wet conditions)  by comparing it with the historical record during the same calendar period. The user can select from most weather stations in the Southeast region and from stations in larger cities across the continental United States.