A staple of the fertile Rio Grande Valley, corn is particularly susceptible to rising temperatures. It’s also a global challenge, as climate change drives food insecurity.
which Little, Brown is releasing July 11. This essay is adapted from the book, his seventh.
And for the last hundred years or so, it has been magical. The Rio Grande Valley — which, in fact, isn’t much of a valley at all, just a big flat expanse of river-bottom land created over centuries by the ever-changing Rio Grande — is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in America, growing everything from watermelons for Fourth of July picnics to sorghum for animal feed to papaya for salads and smoothies.
The challenge the Valley faced was at once local and global. All over the world, extreme heat is hurting crop harvests and driving hunger. Since 2019, thanks in large part to global warming and the war in Ukraine, the number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million. To meet the expected demand for food by midcentury alone, global agricultural output will have to rise by more than 50%.
Racelis lives in a 1960s suburban-style house with a big mesquite tree and a shaggy vegetable garden in the front yard. When I arrived at 7 a.m. one morning in early 2022, he was up and loading gear into his black Nissan Pathfinder. He’s 46. He was wearing a khaki shirt and well-worn work boots, and if you didn’t know who he was you would guess he was a farmer.
“If this heat keeps up,” he said, “broccoli and cauliflower is going to start bolting, which is a big problem.” Aloe has another, even more remarkable heat adaptation: if it gets too hot and dry for too long, the plant can put itself into what amounts to a temporary hibernation, slowing down its metabolism to the point that its water and CO2 needs are minimal. Then when it rains, or sufficiently cools down, the plant wakes up and comes back to life.
In struggling to keep his aloe alive, Cruz had already moved on from growing a crop that might have gone further to address global hunger: corn. The Texas A&M AgriLife Extension lists corn as one of the main field crops grown in the Rio Grande Valley. Farmers were growing it on more than 100,000 acres in the region in 2019. But of all the commercial food crops, corn may be the most vulnerable to heat.
But 80 degrees is very different from, say, 102 degrees. As the world heats up, corn is nearing the limits of its adaptive temperature range. To put it another way, it’s already growing in hot places and now those places are getting hotter. Add a modest heat wave to those already hot places and corn has trouble coping. Add an extreme heat wave and it may not recover at all.
By midsummer, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 42% of Texas corn acreage was in poor or very poor condition. Only 3% was in excellent condition., executive director of Texas Corn Producers, a trade group, said the heat and the drought had been devastating for many farmers even though the market price for corn was high.So why not just plant corn in cooler places? It’s not so simple.
Racelis and I drove out to a 12,000-acre ranch on the western edge of Hidalgo County. He wanted to check in on an experiment he was running that measured the effectiveness of cover crops at keeping moisture in the ground. The temperature had dropped 40 degrees overnight and there was a slight drizzle, which, given the epic drought the region was facing, was a good sign. Racelis talked about how farmers were waiting for one heavy rain before putting crops like cotton and sorghum in the ground.
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