Climate challenges rock Georgia's farms

Jan 10, 2025
By Farms.com

Local agriculture faces frost, floods, and drought

The resilience of Georgia's agriculture is being tested by a series of climate extremes that challenge the traditional farming calendar and crop viability. At Diamond Hill Farm, both the staff and crops are enduring the brunt of these changes.

Carolyn Shew, the farm's communications manager, discusses the recent losses due to unexpected frost events that have wiped out a significant portion of their peach and blueberry yields.

The farm practices Certified Naturally Grown farming but faces growing challenges from climate change, as described by Pam Knox, a local agricultural climatologist. Knox explains that both frost and temperature fluctuations are increasingly difficult to predict, complicating farmers' efforts to protect their livelihoods.

Expensive frost protection techniques, such as overhead sprinklers and heaters, are employed by some, but are often out of reach for smaller farms. This is compounded by issues of drought and flooding, which have altered the landscape of agricultural water management in Georgia.

Even with irrigation systems like those at Diamond Hill, intense periods of drought have led to crop failures, while unexpected heavy rains have flooded fields, ruining crops.

The hurricane season adds to the unpredictability, with potential storms threatening rapid and severe damage. These challenges stress the importance of local support for farmers, who are often financially strained by the need to adapt to these rapid climate changes.

Support mechanisms like CSA programs and local farmers markets are vital, providing consistent support and helping to stabilize farm operations. Knox advocates for these community efforts as essential to sustaining local agriculture and reducing the broader environmental impact.

Farmers in Georgia continue to adapt and innovate in response to these climate challenges, striving to maintain their farms and support their communities despite the increasing unpredictability of their environment.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids