CLIMATE ADAPTATION IN AGRICULTURE

[PUBLICATION] Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture

Spatial patterns in crop adaptation to climate change

Overview

This research, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2023), examines how farms adapting to climate change through shifts in crop selection. Led by Tim Waring, the paper advances the integration of cultural evolution with climate adaptation, using two case studies from contemporary US agriculture. My role here was leading the empirical data analyses, using a novel application of biogeographic methods to agriculture.

Research Approach

Working with an interdisciplinary team, we developed an operational approach to identify cultural adaptation to climate based on established empirical criteria, and applied this framework to analyze two datasets on agricultural practices in the US:

Crop choice patterns from 2008-2021
Cover crop adoption patterns from 2012-2017

Key Findings

Our analysis demonstrates that:

Crop choices are adapting to climate change in some regions of the US, with farmers shifting toward crops that better match changing climate conditions
For cover cropping, evidence suggests adoption may be responding more to economic incentives than to climate variables
Cultural adaptation is occurring unevenly across geographic regions, with important implications for targeted adaptation policy

Methodological Contributions

For the crop choice analysis, I developed a novel analytical approach to detect signals of cultural adaptation to climate change that:

Calculates climate affinity indices for major US crops based on their distribution across climate gradients
Quantifies trends in both climate variables and farm climate indices at the county level
Tests for correlations between climate trends and crop choice trends that would indicate adaptive responses

This framework provides a generalizable method for detecting cultural adaptation to environmental change that could be applied in other agricultural contexts or even to non-agricultural cultural practices.