FEW Workshop - Planned Migration as a Strategy to Sustain Agricultural Production

University Of Alabama In Huntsville, Huntsville AL

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers from the University of Alabama-Huntsville and their NCAR collaborators will convene a workshop in Boulder Colorado to define issues and to share research and ideas relevant to the role that migration of agriculture might play in sustaining production and how the geography of sustainable production might be defined in terms of food, energy, and water nexus systems. The primary outcome from the workshop will be a short report that summarizes primary research needs and potential approaches. The geography of agricultural production in the U.S. changed dramatically in the last century with substantial food and fiber shifting to the arid west under irrigation and grain production becoming concentrated in the upper Midwest. The question is whether this paradigm of the last century is sustainable and reliable for the future. Can some portion of the production in the West now under water stress be migrated back to the East under irrigation? Can some production in the Southwest migrate to the Northwest where water is more plentiful? Can grain production be more geographically distributed to avoid the environmental issues (e.g. nutrient run-off) and vulnerability to small regional droughts that the present concentration of production entails? This geography of agricultural production has also changed energy consumption through electrical energy used to move surface water in the West and to pump water in the High Plains. It has created the need for transportation energy to move refrigerated food from the West to the East and grains from the Midwest to the Southeast for consumption by poultry and swine. On the other hand, a new migration of agriculture back to the Southeast may see competition for water for cooling in thermoelectric generation and hydroelectric losses. This workshop will bring together hydrologists, agronomists, economists, climatologists, ecologists, energy experts, and water resource planners to discuss the vulnerabilities of the present geography of agriculture and discuss whether a new migration of agriculture might sustain production in the coming century.