Green Group discussion

Hop gardens are having to find ways of coping with climate change. The photo shows a storm flattened some poles recently. Irrigation from sustainable sources and adapted plants with larger root balls and higher hop to leaf ratio are also under way. Article in German, your browser may offer to translate.
Hops are one of the ingredients in beer.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/...

In Czech, but your browser may offer to translate. Translation by RTE:


https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/clanek/...

"Plants can adapt to climate change without changing their DNA. They can do this thanks to what is known as epigenetic memory, which can be described in layman's terms as intergenerational memory. This allows them to adapt more quickly to changing temperatures. This is according to a study by Czech scientists published in the journal New Phytologist.

"Epigenetic mechanisms not only allow plants to respond successfully to current climate change, but can also prepare their offspring for the conditions they can expect during their lifetime. This adaptation is particularly remarkable because it does not require any changes to the DNA itself and is therefore significantly faster. This provides direct evidence that epigenetic mechanisms may contribute to the adaptation of plants to changing environments," said one of the study's lead authors, Vít Latzel from the Department of Population Ecology at the Institute of Botany of the CAS.

Scientists have previously found that plants can prepare their offspring for various stresses, such as drought or nutrient deficiencies. Now a new study has provided direct evidence that this is due to so-called epigenetic processes - the transfer of memory between generations."

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d...

Looks like plants also have the Nature vs Nurture situation.

The experiments used strawberries but the research is believed to fit other crops too.

There are plenty of examples of plants adapting to climate change. It was originally feared that when trees sprouted buds in a warm spell during winter months that the buds would die when it got cold again and there wouldn't be any more buds on trees in the spring. The trees are doing fine, plenty of buds.

One tree in our area, coastal southern New England, that didn't make it through the changing climate was the white birch tree. Excess water inside the tree trunk would freeze and expand and rupture the bark, which wasn't strong at all. This happened long before most people were aware that the climate was changing.

Okay, birches are one of the earliest trees to start pushing sap up from the roots in spring. They were too early.

I checked out the birch tree and found that it is a source of tree syrup in Canada and northern US. It turns out the birch tree is moving north into colder climates where it has been doing quite well all along. It is in the areas where it has warmed up that it is unable to survive.

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2013/...

Birch, spruce and aspen are the first trees to grow after glaciation. The birch (Betula) has roots like a saucer, which don't go down far, as it grows on mountainside or permafrost. In Alaska some of the people tap birches for water before real spring arrives.
If I'm pruning birches, I insist on doing it at certain times of year. From mid or end January on is too late. If you cut a branch, the clear sap drips out like water from a tap, and it does that for days. This is why the birch greens so early.
Covers for illustration purposes.

Potato blight spread during cold wet years.


https://phys.org/news/2024-02-text-an...
"North Carolina State University researchers used text analytics on both historic and modern writing to reveal more information about the effects and spread of the plant pathogen—now known as Phytophthora infestans—that caused the 1840s Irish potato famine and that continues to vex breeders of potatoes and tomatoes.

The study examined keyword terms like "potato rot" and "potato disease" after digitizing historic farm reports, news accounts and U.S. Patent Office agricultural records from 1843 to 1845 to show how the pathogen first spread across the northeast United States before causing the devastating famine in Ireland in 1845. The study also used text analysis to track social media feeds for the modern-day spread of late blight.

Textual analysis holds promise as a useful tool to help researchers track and visualize both historic and current plant diseases, the researchers say."

More information: Jean Ristaino, Reconstructing historic and modern potato late blight outbreaks using text analytics, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-52870-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52...

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by North Carolina State University


https://phys.org/news/2021-06-irish-p...

Ancient Grains bread is doing well here in Ireland. This uses heritage varieties which have not been artificially altered, or bred for optimum farming conditions. These cereals can survive in marginal areas and need less fertiliser. I buy these breads and they are usually wholegrain, dense, and tasty.

https://rte.social.ebu.io/U3ENGDLPH1

"Tove Ortman, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), has studied heritage cereals, i.e before they were refined to suit Swedish agriculture and mass production. She explains why the old grains are making a comeback."

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-chan...

"“Climate change is affecting grape yield, composition and wine quality. As a result, the geography of wine production is changing,” the study said. “About 90% of traditional wine regions in coastal and lowland regions of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century because of excessive drought and more frequent heatwaves with climate change.”

The researchers looked at the effects of drought, increasing temperatures and changes in diseases and pests on wine regions across the world, reported AFP. They found that there was a “substantial” risk of 49 to 70 percent of wine-producing regions losing their economic viability, depending on the level of global heating.

“Climate change is changing the geography of wine,” said lead author of the study Cornelis van Leeuwen, a viticulture professor with the Institut des Sciences de la Vigne et du Vin at Bordeaux University and Bordeaux Sciences Agro, as AFP reported. “There will be winners and losers.”"

The study, “Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production,” was published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Another way to look at this topic, is to adapt demand to what crops are available and can be grown in the future.
Japan is using satellite photos of crops in the field, to time adverts for maximum buying. This might minimise transport and lengthy storage.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/1...
"As explained in a Thursday announcment, JAXA and Dentsu worked with the Tsumagoi Village Agricultural Cooperative Association to assess the growth of crops by analyzing images captured from orbit. Those efforts accurately predicted the volume of 2023's cabbage harvest in one village.

Next steps in the project will see weather data added to the mix, to enable predictions of when the harvest will come in.

Dentsu plans to use those predictions to improve forecasted shipping dates for produce, and guess at prices.

Those estimates will then inform advertisers about when and where to promote their wares – both fresh seasonal produce and related products like seasonings used on cabbage."

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Satellite photos are used here in Ireland. A farmer recently told me that he wasn't able to get the last few bales of wrapped silage in due to onset of flooding. They were up against a hedgerow in a low-lying corner. He then got a notice from the Ministry of Agri that 0.04% of his fields were still holding silage that should be in storage. What benefit or consequence this had, I do not know. I'm guessing it's a taxation issue.

Diseases spread faster with climate change. Bananas are almost all one variety nowadays, though many types are available; a good cropper was popular.

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-banana-...
""The kind of banana we eat today is not the same as the one your grandparents ate. Those old ones, the Gros Michel bananas, are functionally extinct, victims of the first Fusarium outbreak in the 1950s," says Li-Jun Ma, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author.

Today, the most popular type of commercially available banana is the Cavendish variety, which was bred as a disease-resistant response to the Gros Michel extinction. For about 40 years, the Cavendish banana thrived across the globe in the vast monocultured plantations that supply the majority of the world's commercial banana crop.

But by the 1990s, the good times for the Cavendish banana had begun to come to a close. "There was another outbreak of banana wilt," says lead author Yong Zhang, who completed his doctorate in UMass Amherst's Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program under Ma's direction. "It spread like wildfire from southeast Asia to Africa and Central America.""

More information: Virulence of the banana wilt-causing fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum tropical race 4 is mediated by nitric oxide biosynthesis and accessory genes, Nature Microbiology (2024).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4156...
Journal information: Nature Microbiology

Provided by University of Massachusetts Amherst

https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2024...

"At a field outside Kozani, northern Greece, the strikingly blue-and-purple petals of saffron give off an intoxicating scent that underscores the value of one of the country's most lucrative crops.

But beneath the beautiful flowers, which can fetch €5 to €9 for a single gram, the earth is cracked and parched after uncommonly long periods of drought, taking a toll on the crop's yield.

"We haven't had a good dose of rain in our area since May," sighed veteran saffron farmer Grigoris Tzidimopoulos.

After the warmest winter and summer since detailed records began in 1960, Greece has now experienced its driest month of October in the last 15 years, according to the national observatory.

"This field used to give us more than a pound (454g) per acre. Last year... from nine acres in all, the yield was three pounds," 68-year-old Tzidimopoulos said.

"Ten or 12 years ago when I sowed, it often snowed. Now we have neither snow nor rain," he added.
...
"Climate conditions have changed so dramatically over the last 20 years that olive trees now flourish in Kozani, something unthinkable previously, Mitsiopoulos said.

"If the (saffron) yield continues to be so low I imagine that producers will abandon it or be forced to try to relocate to more northern areas," he said."

The changing climate where it is suitable for growing grapes is moving the vineyards to more northern regions because it is warmer than it used to be and not too hot for grapes to grow. The condition of the soil must also be good for grapes to grow. The condition of the soil also helps to create a specific taste for a particular type of wine. Changing locations could affect what the wine tastes like and could also determine which kind of grapevine is grown.

https://eos.org/articles/climate-chan...

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-crops-m...

"Cover crops, planted during or after the main crop's growth, help prevent soil erosion, improve fertility, and increase the input of plant-derived nutrients. Soil degradation, driven by unsustainable farming practices, poses serious threats to food security and regional agricultural development.

Cover crops offer an integrated "use-and-maintain" solution to restore degraded farmland. While earlier research has focused on the effects of decaying cover crop residues, this study examined the impact of living cover crops growing alongside the main crop.

The research team from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang conducted a field experiment where maize was intercropped with different cover crop treatments.

The researchers found that legume cover crops increased dissolved organic carbon and available nitrogen in the soil, altering the microbial community structure and promoting carbon cycling. This alleviated microbial carbon limitation, thereby granting microbes easier access to the carbon they needed to thrive.

Grass cover crops, on the other hand, helped maintain soil carbon and total nitrogen levels while boosting overall microbial biomass, particularly among bacterial groups."

More information: Xin Sui et al, Contrasting seasonal effects of legume and grass cover crops as living mulch on the soil microbial community and nutrient metabolic limitations, Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment (2024).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Provided by Chinese Academy of Sciences

Kenya is a country that relies heavily on rain-fed agriculture instead of irrigation, The agriculture sector contributes a third of Kenya’s GDP.

In Kenya it is illegal to share seeds. This was done in 2012 to promote the sales of new seeds every year and to prevent uncertified seeds from being planted. This was supposed to increase productivity and protect farmers.

It has had the opposite effect. Quite often the new seeds are hybrid seeds which are not faring well in the face of climate change. Plus, farmers in recent months suffered losses in the millions of shillings (tens of thousands of dollars) after planting counterfeit seeds bought from private sellers.

The original indigenous plant seeds adapt better to climate change as they have a genetic history of growing under different conditions in the same area.

The hybrid seeds need more fertilizer and water to grow compared to the original Indigenous plant seeds. They are also expensive.

The Global Center on Adaptation created in 2018 is based in the Netherlands. It is a organization that brokerages deals to promote adaptability programs for governments and the private sector.

Global Center on Adaptation president Patrick V. Verkooijen, said “Indigenous crop varieties offer many benefits, particularly their genetic diversity, which helps farmers adapt to climate change, combat pests and diseases and manage poor soil fertility. However, they also come with challenges, such as potentially lower yields or susceptibility to new pests and diseases.”

Local farms say the seed programs that the Global Center on Adaptation promotes are the ones that have lower yields and susceptibility to new pests and diseases. Indigenous seeds are more resilient when grown in the areas they originated from.

Global Center on Adaptation says that governments can promote local seed banks if they want to. Only 44 micro or small grants to 33 countries have been awarded for accelerating their innovative solutions to build resilience in the most vulnerable communities to promote scaled-up adaptation at the local level. This is less than 2 grants per country.

A lot of work still needs to be done. The leaders at the top of the agricultural industry need to realize that the expensive high tech solutions they sell do not always work. They have to work with local organizations with little or no funds who are at the ground level using indigenous procedures and products where results can be instantly seen by the local farmers.

Simple inexpensive methods are needed such as conserving the seeds using traditional methods by covering them with wood ash — believed to repel weevils — or keeping them in earthen pots. He emphasized the use of locally available materials at no cost.

https://seedsaverskenya.org/

https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_...

https://www.adaptation-undp.org/local...

Another old world plant that is more stable in these times of climate change than the traditional product.

A different kind coffee bean plant, excelsa, discovered a hundred yeas ago in Sudan, grown in the mid 1700s in the Philippines, could helped minimize the traditional coffee bean market's soaring costs because of climate change. At the end of the 19th century, Coffea liberica, Liberian Coffee, was also brought to Indonesia to replace the arabica trees killed by the coffee rust disease. It is not immune to coffee rust but does survive longer in the presence of coffee rust than the arabica and robusta species.

"Experts say estimates from drought-stricken Brazil, the world’s top coffee grower, are that this year’s harvest could be down by some 12%."

Discovered more than a century ago in South Sudan, excelsa coffee is exciting cash-strapped locals and drawing interest from the international community amid a global coffee crisis caused mainly by climate change. As leading coffee-producing countries struggle to grow crops in drier, less reliable weather, prices have soared to the highest in decades and the industry is scrambling for solutions.

It compromises only around 1 percent of the market because it was never included in the mainstream coffee industry. The arabica and robusta species make up the bulk of the market. These are smaller plants and more sensitive to irregular rain events that climate change is producing.

"Native to South Sudan and a handful of other African countries, including Congo, Central African Republic and Uganda, excelsa is also farmed in India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The tree’s deep roots, thick leathery leaves and big trunk allow it to thrive in extreme conditions such as drought and heat where other coffees cannot. It’s also resistant to many common coffee pests and diseases."

It is grown in other countries outside of Africa so it already has an footing that could be expanded. Apparently these are all small scale operations so no work has been done on figuring out how to scale up the farms to industrial size productions and outputs.

The bean is larger than the other two main varieties but has a lower caffeine content. Unlike the traditional coffee plants which can grow up to 30 feet, the excelsa tree can grow up to 60 feet tall. It can be pruned to keep it short like the traditional coffee plants, otherwise ladders are needed to harvest the beans.

https://apnews.com/article/south-suda...

https://time.com/7263749/excelsa-bean...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffea_...

Thanks, very interesting to see how plants are adapting or being used.
Banning the sale of any but commercial seeds is not a good idea and leads to farmers organising free swap mechanisms, I give you a sack of pea seeds if you give me a sack of melon seeds. Usually the ban is brought in because companies want to promote Roundup and the plants they sell are genetically modified to resist being sprayed with this weedkiller. That won't be the reason portrayed, but the Green Revolution introduced higher cropping plants more dependent on artificial fertiliser, which is usually made from oil. So you can see that agri-companies are making money from products that are not seeds, when they sell highly dependent seeds.

As for coffee, I've tried alternative types and the problem is that I didn't like all of them, the more adaptable plants may taste like mud.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-is...

"Satellites have been used for large-scale crop monitoring for decades. Because microwaves pass through clouds, radar can be more effective at observing crops during rainy seasons than other technologies such as thermal and optical imaging. The NISAR satellite will be the first radar satellite to employ two frequencies, L- and S-band, which will enable it to observe a broader range of surface features than a single instrument working at one frequency.

Microwaves from the mission’s radars will be able to penetrate the canopies of crops such as corn, rice, and wheat, then bounce off the plant stalks, soil, or water below, and then back to the sensor. This data will enable users to estimate the mass of the plant matter (biomass) that’s aboveground in an area. By interpreting the data over time and pairing it with optical imagery, users will be able to distinguish crop types based on growth patterns.
...
"The NISAR satellite can also help farmers gauge the water content in soil and vegetation. In general, wetter soils tend to return more signals and show up brighter in radar imagery than drier soils. There is a similar relationship with plant moisture."

Some crops are adapting, not in a good way.

https://gizmodo.com/cancer-causing-ar...

"As the planet heats up, this popular process of growing rice is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the millions of people worldwide that eat the grain regularly, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. After drinking water, the researchers say, rice is the world’s second largest dietary source of inorganic arsenic, and climate change appears to be increasing the amount of the highly toxic chemical that is in it. If nothing is done to transform how most of the world’s rice is produced, regulate how much of it people consume, or mitigate warming, the authors conclude that communities with rice-heavy diets could begin confronting increased risks of cancer and disease as soon as 2050."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-future-...

"Extreme heat, droughts, floods and other climate-related events are already disrupting agricultural systems. Projected temperature extremes and climate instability will further reduce crop yields, increasing starvation, political unrest and mass migration, he writes.

There is some hope, however. It may be possible to alter crops in ways that allow them to persist and perhaps even increase yields despite the challenges, Long said. While the process takes time and can be costly, the work has already begun.

For example, researchers are evaluating the heat-, drought- and flood-tolerance of different varieties of specific crop plants, identifying those with potentially beneficial attributes. Discovering the genetic traits that confer these benefits will allow scientists to develop crops—through plant breeding and/or genetic engineering—that can better withstand the extremes.

Through painstaking work, scientists have discovered that some rice varieties can survive up to two weeks of submergence during periods of intense flooding, while other varieties are more heat-tolerant than others. The findings offer opportunities to develop hardier cultivars."

More information: Needs and opportunities to future-proof crops and the use of crop systems to mitigate atmospheric change, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2025).
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
Journal information: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them Dan Saladino

Flax growing and spinning is undergoing a revival in Ireland. At one time 40% of Northern Ireland people were employed in the flax industry. Now, with new composites, the fibres can be used in furniture making as well as the more traditional woven fibre for clothing and film industry costuming. Museum piece machinery is being restored and updated.

Flax seems to enjoy being wet, it is a hundred day crop, and growing it can help replace the use of plastic in many cases. The process of preparing the fibres takes eight stages - as I learnt when I visited the beetling mill some years ago - so all this provides local work.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ulster/2025/0...

That's fantastic. Too many old methods were abandoned simply because they were "old", turns out they can work as good as what we have with much less consequences.

The Fields by Erin Young is a police procedural fiction, looking at genetically modified maize in Iowa and how the community is affected by the loss of small farms. For adult readers only.

Had some bird seed that got accidentally trapped under a layer of leaves that went through a mostly mild winter with a good cold snap. The seeds sprouted and grew a spindly type of grass. It seemed to grow okay, got around 6 to 10 inches tall. Then we had a heat wave, over 90 for 3 days. It turned yellow, looks like it isn't going to go very far.

I don't water the back, it grows wild, whatever survives with just plain natural rain fall. Many different kinds of grasses and weeds grow back there. Plus some traditional flowers. Its mostly local stuff, though some of it was imported into the area 60-70 years ago. Some of the original wild stuff is still around and some of it is gone. The normal stuff made it through the heat wave as it has seen those conditions before.

The bird seed used to be treated so that it wouldn't sprout. Apparently with new supply sources and abandonment of old ideas, the bird seed is now sproutable.

Warmer temperatures can mean wetter and colder weather. The reason is that more water vapour evaporating into the air, produces more cloud cover. Estonia is one of the Eastern European nations which joined the EU. The photo shows a waterlogged potato crop.

https://news.err.ee/1609770552/estoni...

"The government is set to confirm by decree that from April to July of this year, Estonia experienced significantly worse-than-usual weather conditions that have affected agriculture. Based on this, the government plans to apply to the European Commission for emergency aid for Estonian farmers.

Examples of conditions that led to the decision include lower temperatures during the growing season combined with night frosts, as well as excessive moisture and hailstorms.

These have caused a significant drop in crop yields and quality, leading to substantial economic losses for agricultural producers.

Minister of Regional Affairs and Agriculture Hendrik Johannes Terras (Eesti 200) said the decision was not made lightly. Terras told ERR that the government's move effectively amounts to an emergency situation. "If we look at the emergency situation in Latvia, what we adopted today essentially means the same thing. This is our equivalent of a state of emergency, which we've defined differently in our legal framework. But in essence, it means the same thing," Terras said at the government's press conference.

"We've all seen what this summer has been like — an unusually cool spring that halted plant development for weeks, followed by relentless rain and hail, which have put our farmers in an extremely difficult position. For many, this is already the third consecutive difficult year. Crops are failing, quality is declining and it's simply impossible to carry out planned work," he noted."