Welcome to summer. This should be a hot one. Which means bad news for cherries, grapes, pistachios, almonds and most of California’s other cash crops that suffer in extreme heat.
The story of this summer, and of many more to come, is in the crop insurance reports; they make for dense reading, but they reveal the deep vulnerabilities of California’s multibillion dollar agriculture industry to the changing climate. The reports show how a well-intended New Deal-era program intended to shield farmers from losses now incentivizes growing cash crops in ways that are not optimal for current climate realities.
