Long-term meteorological outlook for arable farmers

This first appeared in The Press and Journal on August 19, 2024

By Dr Mike Rivington, Land Use System Modeller.

Scotland’s climate has always been variable, leading to both good weather and soil conditions giving favourable growing conditions and harvests, but also poor years when springs were too dry or harvest time too wet. There have also been many ‘normal’ years between this variation enabling our arable systems to not just cope, but to flourish.

However, climate change, driven by human activities producing more greenhouse gases and reducing carbon sink capacity (such as deforestation), is now increasing the level of variability in our weather nationally and globally affecting growing conditions and threatening productivity.

The frequency and severity of storms is closely related to global scale cycles, particularly El Nino and the speed and position of the jet stream. As El Nino events occur, ocean temperatures rise, increasing the energy available to create storms. During the winter of 2023-24 we had 13 named storms, including Storm Babet, an event that lead to saturated soils from October to late spring, impacting winter sown crops and delaying spring planting. Such conditions are likely to become both more severe and frequent.

Despite these growing threats and associated risks, there are also opportunities. Some future years are likely to have favourable growing conditions resulting in good harvests. What is less well understood is how future climatic conditions will affect crop diseases. The challenge for all types of farming, not just arable, and associated supply chains is learning to cope with the increasing variability and extremes.

On a positive note, the science of understanding the many complicated interacting factors and teleconnections between global climatic influences determining our weather is improving, enabling better anticipation that extremes may occur. This improving knowledge of the climate, combined with research on adaptation and resilience building in agricultural systems, such as that undertaken at The James Hutton on regenerative agriculture, will help us reduce our exposure to risk and the severity of climatic impacts whilst realising some of the benefits. Fundamentally though is the need for climate change mitigation. We need to remove the problems associated with a destabilising climate by reducing the emissions from all sectors of society and work with Nature to capture carbon dioxide. Hence the future outlook, not just meteorologically, is both threatening but also bright – if we understand the scale and proximity of the threat and react according by applying appropriate solutions.