Hot Farm

Climate change is coming for your food. In the American Heartland, farmers are battling increasingly severe weather, with epic floods and heat. Nearly half the land in the United States is used to grow crops and food animals, and agriculture accounts for an impossible to ignore 10 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions. If we’re serious about fighting climate change, we need farmers to be part of the solution. In this documentary, based on Hot Farm, a new podcast from the Food & Environment Reporting Network and hosted by Eve Abrams, we travel across the Midwest, talking to farmers about what they are doing, or could be doing, to combat climate change.

Among the people we meet is David Bishop, an Illinois farmer who became an unlikely Pied Piper in the sustainable agriculture movement. More than 30 years ago, after a drought wiped out his corn and soybean crops, Bishop changed the way he farmed. It was 1988, the same summer that a scientist named James Hansen told Congress that human activity was causing “global warming,” unofficially launching the climate-change era. While Bishop’s neighbors vowed that next year would be better, Bishop decided that he couldn’t go on doing the same thing. He started diversifying the crops he grew and replacing chemical fertilizer with manure. Over the next decade he kept asking himself, “What else can I do?” He began selling what he grew directly to consumers—something virtually unheard of in farm country back then. He didn’t consider what he was doing a crusade against climate change, but rather a way to break free of a system that was squeezing farmers from both ends—forcing them to grow only a handful of commodity crops and sell those crops to a handful of big buyers who set the prices. Along the way, Bishop has inspired—and helped guide—many younger farmers. Which is crucial, because as Abrams explains, we need more Dave Bishops if we are going to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions coming from U.S. agriculture.

In the second half of the documentary, we meet some farmers who, unlike Bishop, are still raising commodity crops and remain unconvinced that how they farm is contributing to climate change. This is true of most American farmers. But as producer Dana Cronin explains, farmers are practical above all else. If doing something differently makes farming and financial sense, they’re likely to embrace it. This is how Lin Warfel, who is skeptical of man-made climate change, came to be involved in a farmer-led initiative called Saving Tomorrow’s Agriculture Resources, STAR for short. The idea is to change farming practices in ways that safeguard the soil—the foundation of a farmer’s livelihood—for the next generation to farm. But many of the practices endorsed by STAR also help reduce carbon emissions, even if that isn’t the reason the farmers adopt them. It’s the kind of voluntary, meet-them-where-they-are strategy that the USDA and others hoping to convince farmers to join the climate.

Learn more about the podcast at thefern.org/podcasts/hot-farm