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New York Farm Bureau Utilizes Virtual Reality to Highlight Agricultural Labor

By Sydney Garrett

Feeding the world is no small task, and with much of the work being done in rural America, it can be hard for much of the country to fully comprehend how food goes from farm to fork. In hopes of shining light on all areas of agricultural labor, New York Farm Bureau created a virtual reality video experience series highlighting the importance that agricultural labor plays in supplying the domestic food system.

The video series features multiple farmers from across the state, covering what farming looks like on a daily basis, including the labor challenges. These videos are used to show legislative representatives, government agency staff and consumers what it takes to get food to their tables.

Once the video experiences were created, New York Farm Bureau implemented a media campaign that pushed them out to state and federal representatives. They also set up virtual reality screenings at various county Farm Bureau events and New York Farm Bureau’s legislative reception.

Strategic Action Fund

New York Farm Bureau’s virtual reality project was funded through a grant from AFBF’s Strategic Action Fund. Through the fund, state Farm Bureaus with fewer than 25,000 members were eligible to apply for funding of up to $5,000 for public policy-related projects.

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Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.