USDA Regional Climate Hub's Adaptation Resources for Agriculture Responding to Climate Change in the Midwest and Northeast.

USDA established a network of Climate Hubs to deliver practical science based information, tools, strategies, and technical support to farmers, ranchers and forest land owners needing solutions to address challenges associated with climate change.  Farmers and forest land owners in the Midwest and Northeast are seeing increasingly severe weather, temperature shifts, and droughts pose a threat to their operations.  To help farmers respond, regional Hubs teamed up to develop “Adaptation Resources for Agriculture”, a USDA Technical Bulletin to help integrate climate change considerations into both long range plans and annual plans of action so goals for production, profitability, and stewardship can be met.   

Information resources to help agricultural producers adapt to a changing climate include access to climate assessments and decision support tools, a synthesis of adaptation strategies and approaches organized in a tiered structured “menu” of science based responses, and a workbook to identify which responses address site specific impacts and guide their development into flexible adaptive tactics.   The workbook is intended for use in a small workshop setting to enable producer engagement in understanding how climate change impacts farming and natural resources and how to respond for the benefit of current and future generations. 

This document is based upon the Forest Adaptation Resources developed by the US Forest Service and Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science in 2012 and used by hundreds across a wide variety of management and conservation projects on public and private lands. The Adaptation Resources for Agriculture version has been modified specifically to meet the unique needs of agricultural producers.  Four examples of typical farms in the region; dryland farming in Nebraska, corn and soybeans in Iowa, beef grazing in Missouri, and confined dairy in Pennsylvania, demonstrate how an adaptation perspective helped to consider challenges and opportunities of a changing climate.