Tag: drought

May 9, 2011 General Ag News and Notes, Globel Warming Post a Comment

Trees provide natural record of El Niño trends

Studying treering records from the southwestern United States, University of Hawaii scientists have helped assemble a 1,100-year historical picture of the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, offering an avenue to understanding how weather patterns could change in a warming world.

El Niño, associated with warmer than usual sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, typically produces a wide array of violent weather, including more rain and intense storms in some areas, less rain in others. The massive El Niño of 1997-98, for instance, caused flooding and landslides in Northern California, drought and famine in Bangladesh and drought and forest fires in the Philippines; 2,100 people died worldwide.

UH scientist Jinbao Li said by email that the record implies that warmer oceans will lead to more severe El Niños and the opposite phenomena, La Niñas, and more extreme climate conditions around the globe. But a final verdict awaits better climate models, he said.

Formally known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the phenomenon also brings rainy winters to the U.S. Southwest, where tree rings are wide in wet years and narrow in dry years.

UH researchers Li, Shang-Ping Xie, Fei Lui and Jian Ma analyzed the tree-ring records available in a database called the North American Drought Atlas and found that the results correlated closely with the 150-year sea surface temperature records in the tropical Pacific.

Continue reading
March 15, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Chocolate is locally grown product

Bob and Pam Cooper acquired more than 1,800 cacao trees in Holualoa over a decade ago and established the Original Hawaiian Chocolate Factory. They’ve been processing 100 percent Hawaii-grown cacao into chocolate products ever since. Bob also grows and sells cacao trees, encouraging others to grow this valuable crop. West Hawaii now has many cacao growers and several budding artisanal chocolate makers.

Cacao originated in the Amazon and Orinoco River basins of Ecuador and Brazil, and has been cultivated in Central and South America for thousands of years. Theobroma, the genus of the cacao tree, translates to “food of the gods” and the resulting chocolate was once reserved solely for the pleasure of Aztec kings.

Today, cacao growing and chocolate making is a global industry, but with more local growers and those making chocolate with locally grown ingredients, localvores can satisfy their chocolate urge with a reduced carbon footprint.

Cacao is a tropical rain forest tree and thrives in areas with temperatures above 50 degrees and about 60 inches of annual rainfall or good irrigation. It is especially well-suited to areas in Kona that get a cool afternoon cloud cover. You might consider adding a few cacao trees, if your growing conditions are suitable.

Continue reading
March 9, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Send in the Fronds

THE Archbishop John Ireland used to pray in my kitchen — or so the neighbors say. Long before it was my attic apartment, this space was reportedly his home chapel in St. Paul, Minn.

A giant of American Catholicism in the early 20th century, Archbishop Ireland gave the Twin Cities a pair of monumental churches, the Basilica of St. Mary and the Cathedral of Saint Paul. He left me something humbler: a third-floor walk-up with sloping bead board ceilings and dormer windows.

These cubbies, carved into the wainscoting, look as if they were meant to display something. But what? A domed canary cage? A bust of St. Polycarp, patron saint of earache sufferers?

The other day, I experienced something like an epiphany. What the kitchen needed was a hanging fern.

A few decades ago, the plant to buy would have been obvious: a Boston fern. Anyone would recognize Nephrolepis exaltata. It’s the ferny-looking fern — the one with the long, shaggy ruffles of greenery, cascading like a fondue fountain.

The Boston fern is not without its merits, noted Tom Stuart, proprietor of the Hardy Fern Library, an online taxonomical guide.

“There’s almost no way to kill a Boston fern,”

Continue reading
February 16, 2011 General Ag News and Notes, Globel Warming Post a Comment

Study Links Rise in Rain and Snow to Human Actions

An increase in heavy precipitation that has afflicted many countries is at least partly a consequence of human influence on the atmosphere, climate scientists reported in a new study.

In the first major paper of its kind, the researchers used elaborate computer programs that simulate the climate to analyze whether the rise in severe rainstorms, heavy snowfalls and similar events could be explained by natural variability in the atmosphere. They found that it could not, and that the increase made sense only when the computers factored in the effects of greenhouse gases released by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels.

As reflected in previous studies, the likelihood of extreme precipitation on any given day rose by about 7 percent over the last half of the 20th century, at least for the land areas of the Northern Hemisphere for which sufficient figures are available to do an analysis.

The principal finding of the new study is “that this 7 percent is well outside the bounds of natural variability,” said Francis W. Zwiers, a Canadian climate scientist who took part in the research.

Continue reading
February 8, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

U.N. warns China drought could pressure wheat prices

A record drought in China’s major wheat producing areas threatens to push world food prices beyond their current high level, the United Nations warned in a report Tuesday, adding to growing concern about how the rising cost of food is affecting the poor around the globe.

China, the world’s largest wheat producer, consumes almost all of what it grows and keeps roughly 55 million tons in reserve. But the prospect of a failed winter wheat crop might prompt the country to import grain on a scale that could put further stress on world prices, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned.

The FAO’s world food price index, a composite indicator of the cost of a basket of goods, is at its highest level since it was introduced in 1990. Wheat prices have roughly doubled since mid-2010, according to International Monetary Fund data.

Rainfall has been more than 30 percent below normal since October across five northern provinces that account for about two-thirds of Chinese wheat production, the FAO reported. Shandong province, China’s second-largest wheat-growing area, has had less than half an inch of rain since September and is heading for its worst drought in 200 years, according to reports from China’s official news agency.

Continue reading
January 8, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Recent rainfall eases drought

Downpours have ended drought conditions on Oahu and Kauai, but the suffering continues for farmers and ranchers on other islands

Oahu and Kauai are no longer officially in drought conditions after last month’s heavy rain, the National Weather Service said.

But farmers and ranchers are still suffering, especially those on Maui, Molokai and the Big Island, where some ranchers are reportedly still hauling water to support their livestock.

National Weather Service hydrologist Kevin Kodama said “conditions on the leeward side of the Big Island, which is a dry area normally, improved slightly.”

However, last month’s rainfall “was not enough since it occurred over a short period of time,” too short to eliminate the drought conditions there.

The report issued by the Weather Service is just one of several steps that must be met before the emergency drought declaration issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is lifted. The emergency declaration, which made farmers and ranchers eligible for emergency loans and other payments, was issued for the Big Island in 2006, Maui and Molokai in 2007 and Kauai and Oahu last January.

“It’s good news,” said Diane Ley, state executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency.

However, it will be several years before the state’s pasture lands recover from the past four years of drought conditions.

Continue reading