Interim Report to Alberta Innovates.

During the summer of 2017, agriculture in the southern Prairies was hit by extreme drought. Such extreme weather events are increasingly likely with climate change. Although Canadian agriculture may benefit from some warming, more extreme weather will be harmful. Our project aims to develop the data sets and tools required to assess potential future climate impacts on crop production in the Canadian Prairie Provinces, as well as best management practices to help farmers adapt to climate change. Climate change and associated extreme weather events present a major challenge for food production. Whilst farm management climate mitigation tools have advanced in recent years, climate adaptation tools and the associated understanding of climate resilient farm management practices have lagged behind. Currently we have a good understanding of climate change, extreme weather events, and associated crop losses from meteorological and insurance datasets. And there has been some experimental and modeling work on farm-level adaptation choices (e.g., economic costs and benefits of diversified crop rotations and projections of future impacts on specific crops). What is missing is statistical “big data” analysis that builds a clearer understanding of which regions and cropping systems are most vulnerable to climate change, and which farm characteristics or management practices can help mitigate future risk. An analysis of climate risk focussing on single crops is likely to be inadequate to encompass the range of production choices that together form operational production systems. We propose to fill this research gap by compiling data at both regional and farm scales on weather, crop yields, and farm management practices for the three Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba). We will build statistical models to explore which management practices may help alleviate climate risks, relative to different contexts in which producers operate.