Weather & Climate

Happy September! The light at the end of the tunnel after a long hot summer, with the first early winter squash this week as we head towards fall in the beautiful cooler weather at the end of summer.

JUST KIDDING, it’s above 95 degrees all week and time to talk about the weather. I accept these sorts of conditions in July, but, you know, at this point I’m over it—September is no time for this. In earlier years of the CSA I remember “the weather” being a fairly common topic of the weekly newsletters, but it doesn't end up coming up that often anymore. I think that's because the weekly weather used to have a critical, direct effect on the weekly work list—in particular rain and the week's rain forecast, which determined tillage timing and interrupted transplanting schedules with soggy fields. As the years went on, as we were exposed to more extreme weather situations, and as the weather patterns seemed to become more unusual (and weather forecasts less reliable), I made incremental changes to farm systems, crop plans, and decision-making principles so that farm operations became more resilient to these events—and so at this point, run-of-the-mill weekly weather barely affects our ability to get plants in the ground on time and has relatively little impact on the work list. It's also the case that with the longer periods of dryness between large rains these days, there just isn't rain often enough to get in the way of all that much.

And so “the weather,” that perennial farmer-favorite topic, rarely shows up in the weekly newsletter anymore. Because I know what to do about weather, which is to say, the various rainstorms, dry weeks, hot days, frosty nights, etc that all require certain decision making and work-list decisions to shepherd the farm to best effect. The bigger factor now, and what I do NOT yet know quite what to do about, is the climate—which is to say, the typical and expected weather patterns over time—and the major events a shifting climate can bring once a year, which still can determine the season's success.

Sometimes it feels like I'm just primed to see unexpected events as a product of shifting climate, where there in fact has always been surprising weather, and no year exactly like the last. But for us to have experienced all within the span of nine months: a shock of 5 degrees for 12 straight hours last Christmas, and then unseasonably warm conditions for the entire rest of the winter with barely a flake of snow, leading to a good percentage of the onion seedlings being eaten by onion maggots (their typical mid-spring timeline so accelerated by the warm winter that their emergence coincided with our ideal and unusually-early onion planting day of March 31st), and then biblical levels of potato beetles, weeks without rain followed by spring deluges of several inches turning the ground from “too dry to till” directly to “to wet to till”, and a parched summer with rain forecasts evaporating week by week, and days of wildfire smoke—a curiosity a couple years ago from west coast fires, but by now an accepted possibility, smoke visibly hanging in the air with no escape in a feeling reminiscent of the pandemic era, except in reverse, where indoors is the safe, un-masked location and masks are worn in the dangerous outdoor air. And now the hottest week of the year arrives, in September, a month that hasn't topped 97 degrees in my lifetime (at Dulles), and here we have three days in a row hotter than that. And of course, overall, this is the hottest year on record (which really has stopped being news; most years nowadays are the hottest on record.) Wells haven’t run dry and nothing’s on fire, but that just seems like more unusual events than there used to be in a year, and it's only September.

We’re doing all right with the weather this week (we know what to do this week when it's hot—the same as we do in July) and we're prepared to meet the challenges as the intensity of weather dials up and it comes to be more likely now to have major deluges followed by long periods of dryness, rather than reasonable amounts of rain at regular intervals. And then there is the increased and real risk of intense and unavoidable hailstorms that may in any given year track across the farm, for which there is no preparation—as happened in 2020, and will happen again. But in the big picture it’s not clear what the future brings, with the newly variable climate year-to-year an unknown challenge. We've experienced new possibilities of climate-related pest appearance not before imagined—and so we'll learn to cover the onions with netting, and introduce an organic spray for potato beetles, while changing the mix of potato varieties and planting density to have the best result in case of early death. Someday, to our great surprise, it will have been dry not for a few weeks, but for a few months, or more, and we'll wonder if (or when?) drought can become so extreme that our well runs dry. Now knowing wildfire smoke can arrive without warning, we will be ready with masks and air-quality protocol for hot-weather outdoor work, but there will likely be a summer when we see smoke-filled air not for a couple days, but for weeks on end, as already happens in other parts of the country. Not to mention the ways that a changing climate affects the larger infrastructure we rely on, like the electrical grid which suffers under demand during extreme weather and has gone down in other parts of the country. We already get our electricity from solar panels; do we invest in off-grid capability before or after experiencing an extended outage?

In the earlier years of the farm the moment-to-moment implementation of the farm consumed my decision making and efforts at improvement, working out what to do for situations that might arise weekly or monthly in years to come; now it seems like that planning turns more and more long term, making subtle changes to increase resilience as once-outlier events become more and more possible. The process for meeting future challenges is really the same one as has allowed the farm to come to where it is today in the first place—I mean, farming was never a straightforward uncomplicated enterprise—it's just that what's to come may involve new and unexpected challenges different from the one ones my neighbors here and I have all faced for years. As we've solved problems in the past, we'll meet future problems just the same.