What Are The Potential Impacts For Californias Agriculture?
Potential impacts, such as reduced water supply, more severe droughts, more winter floods, and drier growing seasons will affect agriculture (a $26 billion Californian industry in 1997). Many farms especially in the fruit and nut business require long-term investments, making fast adaptation difficult, and could thus experience serious losses if decisions continue to be made with no regard to expected climate changes. Water is needed year-round, especially for perennial crops. Perennial Crop growers can not shift quickly to new types of cultivars and they need reasonable water supply projections such as several decades for trees and vines. Problems with crops can persist many years if there is an extreme weather or pest-related event. Fruit trees are particularly vulnerable. Too much rain or too little rain can be a problem, as well as pest impacts, too much or too little fog, less frost days, and changes in the timing of the season can all disrupt their market. In order to better deal
