Bumper crops against the odds

Canada’s agricultural breadbasket has been racked by drought since 2020 – punctuated by floods. This, many scientists have predicted, is the troubling future of Canadian farming in a changing climate.

But there’s a surprise. It’s not that the weather isn’t hotter and drier and more extreme. It is all that. It’s that crop yields are rising anyway.

Canada announced record yields of wheat and canola this past season. Most of its crops are exported, so it is keeping down prices globally.

How did they do it? No single dramatic step, but rather a steady drumbeat of incremental improvements and investments raising productivity per acre even under stressful conditions.

More than half a century ago, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote the bestselling “The Population Bomb,” arguing that the planet could no longer feed itself, and that famines would be starving millions by the end of the 1970s. Instead, productivity per acre for staples like wheat and rice has tripled, and famines have become dramatically more rare.

Sources: Reuters; “The Population Bomb”