![]() ![]() A fruit or nut tree planted today may, depending on the species, be ill-suited to climatic conditions by the time it begins bearing fruit in five or ten years. Trees present a particular challenge: Conditions shift, but the trees can’t move. (“You should meet my daughter I think she agrees with you on the climate business,” he told me recently.) But even seven years ago, Duarte was on the forefront of researching tree varieties suited to a hotter, drier, saltier future. When I first met Duarte back in 2012, he resisted calling the shifts he was seeing climate change: “Whether it’s carbon built up in the atmosphere or just friggin’ bad luck,” he said then, “the conditions are straining us.” Today, he still avoids the climate change label. Things began to change about a decade ago, according to John Duarte, the nursery’s president. The nursery now sprawls over 200 acres in the town of Hughson, just outside Modesto. Founded four decades ago, the nursery grew rapidly as water piped into the valley from the Sierras gave birth to the most bounteous center for agriculture in North America. Photo Essay: Climate Change in the Central Valleyĭuarte, one of the largest commercial nurseries in the world, specializes in tree nuts and fruits, which have boomed across the valley in recent decades. The Disrupters Meet the Disruption: Tech Steps Up to Big Ag and Climate Change ‘Centers of Insurrection’: Central Valley Farmers Reckon With Climate Change “Reckoning in the Central Valley” is a collaboration between Bay Nature and KQED Science examining how climate change is laying bare the vulnerabilities of California agriculture. Sidebar block text Reckoning in the Central Valley The big overarching, if unmentionable, force driving these experiments is climate change, which is beginning to roil the Central Valley. Each is being subjected to versions of the stresses experienced just outside these walls in fields across the Central Valley: declining levels of water, escalating levels of salt. The saplings, planted in a high-nutrient agar mix that accelerates growth, are no more than two inches high and a few weeks old. Rows of steel racks contain numerous tiny almond, apple, walnut, pomegranate, pecan, avocado, fig, and pistachio trees in small translucent plastic cylinders. Inside a climate-controlled laboratory at the Duarte Nursery outside Modesto, an experiment is taking place that could help determine what food we will eat for decades to come. Pistachio orchards, like these at Gilkey Ranch near Five Points, California, are producing the nut of the future, say farmers, because the crop goes dormant during drought and demands less water and better tolerates salty water than traditional almond crops do. ![]()
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