Climate change gives local agriculture a boost – tweak but true

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To be blunt, experts say that the New England food economy stands to benefit from the damage that global warming threatens to do to other parts of the country—especially because climate models don’t predict that the Northeast, unlike other regions, will see any significant decrease in annual rainfall. Drought in California is already causing crop failure there, while the vast scale of the farms in the Midwest makes it difficult for growers to be flexible and reactive enough to keep up with unpredictable weather patterns. David Wolfe, a professor at Cornell University who studies agriculture and climate change, said it’s likely that supermarket buyers—the folks who order the food that we see on shelves—will be glad to have local options at a time when, say, the tomato harvest in California can’t be relied on to deliver. “They might be thinking, ‘Well, we can’t count on those guys because every other year they have a problem with drought,’” Wolfe said.