New Academy on Climate Resilience to Connect Specialty Crop Professionals

Aug 30, 2023

By Seth Truscott

A team led by scientists at Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture & Natural Resources (CSANR) is establishing the Specialty Crop Climate Change Extension Academy to improve Extension and USDA professionals’ capacity to support climate preparedness.

The new training academy is being funded by a $1.5 million Climate Hub grant from the USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Foundational and Applied Science Program. Its goal is to facilitate forward-thinking conversations about climate change resiliency among professionals in the fruits, vegetables, seeds, and other specialty crops industries.

“This new academy is about finding peers in specialty crop agriculture and making connections across regions,” said Chad Kruger, CSANR director and lead investigator of the training project, titled “Analogs for Dialogs.”

This fall, team members will recruit a cohort of 20 Extension and USDA Climate Hub professionals in major centers of U.S. fruit and vegetable production to the academy. Recruits will learn about climate change factors and communication strategies, developing their ability to support grower preparedness.

A major focus of the project is fostering cross-regional connections through climate analogs: for each target region, an “analog” site will be chosen with a current climate that matches the target’s expected future. Participants from paired sites will engage virtually and through site visits.

“Conversations that help growers get to know their counterparts, and what they’re dealing with, will empower them more than us simply giving them information,” said project manager Teal Potter, a postdoctoral researcher with CSANR. “We’re looking for people who know there’s a need to prepare for a changing climate, but don’t really know what to do about it.”

Collaborating with the grant team, Siddharth Chaudhary and Kirti Rajagopalan, scientists with WSU’s Department of Biological Systems Engineering, study the value of analogs for cross-regional conversations on climate change adaption. Their recently published research in Scientific Reports characterized analogs for all specialty crop counties in the U.S., bringing together Extension professionals from paired locations to discuss regional practices.

A map of the lower 48 U.S. states, showing eight USDA Climate Hub regions and potential cross-regional connections for climate change and specialty crops. The arrows show target-analog pairings between specialty crop-growing counties; from recent research by WSU scientists.

In a complex system like agriculture, climate change creates opportunities and risks, with multiple dimensions and tradeoffs,” Rajagopalan said. “You need multiple iterations of interactive dialog to capture the nuanced insights that lead to climate preparedness for society. Who better than Extension professionals to create the bridge between research, Extension, and society?”

Team members represent WSU, the University of Florida, the University of Minnesota, and the Ag and Food Systems Institute, and work in partnership with six regional USDA Climate Hubs.

Academy participants will be admitted this fall, with training beginning early in 2024.

Source : wsu.edu

Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.