By Rebecca Messner

When it comes to purchasing clean energy, the more the merrier. (Photo by Hepburn Wind.)

We join together with our fellow humans for the sake of saving a buck all the time. That’s why public transportation exists — it’s cheaper for 20 people to get on one bus than it is for 20 people to drive their own cars. (Oh right, and buses are also super cool.) Or think of roommates — sure, they never wash their dishes, but living with them saves us hundreds of dollars in rent.

Groundswell, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., wants to add clean electricity to the list of things that are better off shared.

Groundswell was founded by three guys who worked on President Obama’s campaign in 2008. “They had really seen the impact of community organizing in a political space,” says Elizabeth Lindsey, the group’s managing director. “And after the campaign, they were really interested in seeing how you could take that model and make a tangible difference outside the political sphere.”

To do this, Groundswell helps communities leverage their collective purchasing power to win the best possible deals on clean energy. They bring together nonprofits, community groups, churches, or individuals to make bulk purchases of wind-powered electricity, for example, or energy efficiency upgrades on homes and buildings. Buying as a group allows them to negotiate lower prices, and could potentially make this type of service available in areas where individuals and solitary community groups cannot afford it alone.

Reverend Tom Knoll of First Trinity Lutheran Church says his congregation saved $6,000 in a year by partnering with other Washington, D.C., churches to buy wind power. The church plowed the savings into charitable programs such as a food pantry, low-income housing, and job training programs. An added bonus was getting to know other churches, he says: “We don’t normally talk to one another, even though we may all be Christian.”

Lindsey, who worked in green workforce development before joining Groundswell, was attracted by the organization’s emphasis on job creation. “There were often government programs or nonprofit programs that were paying for training programs, but there weren’t necessarily jobs available for these individuals once the training had occurred,” she says. “When I first heard about Groundswell, I was really impressed by the fact that they were looking at the other side of the equation — not just, like, ‘We need to train people,’ but ‘How can we actually build a clean economy where jobs are actually created?’”

Lindsey also notes that together, groups can make demands that align with their values — like insisting on only working with contractors who provide health care for their employees or hire local residents or unemployed workers. “Because these groups are working together, they’re able to build in different social outcomes that they’d like to see,” she says.

But bringing clean energy to poor communities has been a challenge for the group. Although Groundswell does work in some underserved communities in D.C. and Maryland, even buying in bulk, costs can be prohibitive. “It’s expensive to get your home weatherized, and quite honestly, a lot of low-income communities can’t afford it,” Lindsey says.

Still, over time, Groundswell’s model of empowering communities may provide the missing link in the clean economy: consumer demand. Like the organization’s name, Lindsey says, “it’s a wave that builds over time. If you have one person, it’s great. But if you have five people, 10 people — we’re really building these powerful groups of consumers together.”

By David Roberts

Last week, I wrote about my quest to buy a new car. We’re sick of our minivan/land yacht and want something smaller and more fuel-efficient that will nonetheless fit our whole family (and our dog) for our daily city commute.

I received all sorts of helpful advice/tips/info in the comments on that post. It made me appreciate anew the great community we have here at Grist.

After so many years of doing this, I’ve even come to appreciate the more … enthusiastic feedback. I learned that I should get a new wife because mine complains too much, that I should get rid of my dog, or leave the dog at home, that I should stop being a cosseted hypocrite and start getting my kids to school and doing my errands by bus or bike, and that above all, I should never, ever say anything nice about cars generally or any car specifically and that by doing so I have disgraced myself, disgraced Grist, and most likely disgraced the baby Jesus.

Thing is, the way I was shopping for a car — seeking a balance of features, comfort, and fuel efficiency — is what I take to be the “normal” way Americans shop for cars. Many Americans care about fuel-efficiency, and some about sustainability, but very few care enough for those qualities to trump all other considerations. And fewer still are willing to rearrange their daily lives around the inconveniences of sub-par public transit systems in order to avoid the sin of car ownership.

The dolorous monks among the commenters reflect, I fear, what the great mass of non-environmentalists expect from environmentalists: scorn, condescension, and above all, judgment. When I tell civilians that I write for an “environmental website,” they immediately take on a guilty mien and start shifting from foot to foot, stammering about how they try to recycle, as though they’re trying to apologize for or justify their daily habits. They expect me, as an environmentalist, to be a kind of monk, full of virtue and contemptuous of their lack.

It is not a role I want any part of. And it is not to environmentalism’s benefit that people think of it that way, as a kind of ascetic order standing outside U.S. consumer culture, condemning those within as weak and fallen.

David’s new Prius, bathed in Seattle’s uncharacteristic May sunshine.

Anyway, thanks to the many people who weighed in with constructive insights, on- and off-line. I know that tens and tens of you are following this quest with bated breath, so I shall herewith report the results. I’m afraid it’s not very exciting. In fact, we made what is, for people in our circumstance, the most boring, predictable choice conceivable. We’re basically a Portlandia skit.

We bought a used Prius.

In the end, we couldn’t justify the ecological impact or financial cost of buying a new car. There is, I admit (even if the green righteous will not), a powerful attraction to buying a new car. It’s a big, shiny new toy! It’s got all the new tech widgets. Everything works just so. And that smell …

David’s kids like the new car.

But ecologically speaking, a huge chunk of a car’s impact comes in manufacturing. And economically speaking, it loses a huge chunk of its value the minute it drives off the lot. There’s just no way to justify buying a new car. I say that as someone who wanted, and kind of still wants, to do it.

The question then became: Where can we find high in-city gas mileage in a used vehicle? And on that metric, nothing compares with a Prius. Not even close. There are some small cars that can get up to the mid- to high-30s on the highway. A VW Jetta TDI wagon, for instance, gets great highway mileage. But for city driving — which is 95 percent of what we do — nothing beats a hybrid. The very best gasoline or diesel alternatives are a good 10 mpg lower in the city. There are Honda Insights around, but they’re too small. We don’t want an SUV, so the Escape is out. There are lots of new hybrid hatchbacks, but very few used ones. So …

Forest fits in the new car.

I borrowed a friend’s Prius and drove around for a while with my dog in the back. And while the hatch area is not as spacious as it would be in a Prius v (sigh), it’s plenty big. The dog will be fine.

So there it is: We’re getting a black 2009 Prius with about 35,000 miles on it for around $20K ($2K or so under blue book). We view this as the medium-chill choice: good-enough. My wife didn’t get the tan interior she wanted, but she got leather seats (easier to clean!). I didn’t get the cargo room I wanted, but I got enough. And we’re getting up to 50 mpg in the city, which is pretty damn sweet.

Anyway, thus is my car saga, come to a close. Thanks for following along!

By Michele Simon

Editor’s note: For another perspective on this series, see this post.

The Weight of the Nation — a four-part mini-series that ran this week on HBO (and online) — has received a lot of attention. Produced in coordination with several federal government agencies and paired with a major national conference, the show has been heralded as “groundbreaking” and “bold.” But it’s really just the same old story.

The Weight of the Nation trailer alone smacks of tired stereotypes, but colleagues implored me to watch the entire series, so I did. And it was even worse than I feared.

I’m all in favor of bringing more attention to the nation’s diet-related health crisis. But the HBO series distracts us with the usual scare tactics, dances around the hard political issues, and leaves the viewer with the misguided impression that if we all just worked harder in our own communities, we could fix this mess.

A still from Weight of the Nation.

Fear the fat — more shaming and blaming

Many others have provided excellent explanations for why all the alarm-sounding over obesity should be questioned from a scientific perspective. For example, see Deb Burgard’s and Linda Bacon’s responses to the series, which both stem from the Health at Every Size movement, and aim to shift away from size and fat-shaming toward health and compassion.

Marilyn Wann also gives a historical overview and critique of the series and disputes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s claim that Weight of the Nation is “an unprecedented public health campaign.”

But even without getting into a debate over data, there’s clear evidence — in the form of scientific research — that many people exhibit “obesity bias.” In other words, fat people have enough problems dealing with discrimination, bullying, and stigma, and shows like this make life even more difficult for them.

Indeed, the first two episodes were all about the sad people suffering from one malady or another, interspersed with health-expert talking heads scaring us with statistics and images of organs and surgeries. There was not a peep about thin people’s risk for many of the same diet-related chronic diseases.

What The Weight of the Nation got right

The third segment, which focuses on children, did finally address junk food marketing, with excellent quotes from folks like Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center on Obesity and Food Policy (he calls such marketing “powerful, pernicious, and predatory”), and Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Marketing shapes kids’ choices, to foods that will kill them,” Wootan told the filmmakers. This segment also included good footage of a congressional hearing on the marketing of processed food, the only foray into actual policymaking in the entire program.

Also helpful were segments on agricultural policies and the way our bodies are hardwired to conserve fat. These were a clear attempt to shift the conversation away from personal responsibility. However, none of these discussions dove deeply enough into the politics. Overall, the show’s messages stayed safely in the realms of medicine, exercise, behavior change, and localized solutions.

Missed opportunities

The Weight of the Nation includes numerous examples of soda and junk food marketing to children, but spends far too little time on the powerful lobbying by the food, advertising, and media industries that undermine policymaking. And it’s not like such information isn’t readily available.

During a segment showing Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) wandering the streets of his city in search of healthy food, I thought: This would be a great time to talk about how the American Beverage Association lobbied to stop his soda tax proposal. (The group even donated $10 million to Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital to ensure his silence.) But no, not a chance.

On a similar note, many of the experts on the show identified soft drinks as enemy No. 1. But none of the many scenes with New York City’s Health Commissioner Tom Farley mentioned that city’s attempt to restrict food stamp spending on soft drinks — another attempt at policy change that got heavy push-back from the soda industry.

I was hopeful during one segment when the talking heads admitted that exercise and physical activity were really far less important than food intake when it comes to addressing obesity, a point I’ve made related to children. (Kudos for the experts’ takedown of the awful show The Biggest Loser.)

But despite this, far too much emphasis was placed on exercise throughout the program and the only tangible policy ideas were for things like walking and bike paths.

Where are the policy solutions?

In fact, most disappointing was how the program offered no clear policy solutions. And not a single lawyer appeared to discuss litigation as a strategy to hold the food industry accountable. And what about the farm bill, which is up for renewal this year?

Nope, that’s all too edgy — even for HBO.

Of course, the entire project was produced in collaboration with the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which isn’t exactly going to criticize the Obama administration for its failure to lead on numerous food issues. Also featured prominently was the congressional advisory body, the Institute of Medicine, which released a set of recommendations last week that are remarkably similar to those released seven years ago.

Obesity distracts from food system change

Continuing to focus on obesity is problematic for numerous reasons. As this program painfully demonstrates, it’s too easy to place the blame on individuals as the locus of change. Add to that how the food industry uses obesity as an excuse to market healthier foods (while they help fund playgrounds and exercise programs) and you have a smokescreen behind which the real issues are often obscured.

Instead of focusing on body size, let’s garner the political power we need to fix the food system. This approach is admittedly much more complex than calories in/calories out, but it’s also more compassionate. As Deb Burgard explains, the blame game is just too easy:

Blaming fatness keeps us from addressing the root causes of our problems and is clearly unfair to fat people. Many powerful people understand this but find it expedient to frame a problem in terms of fat in order to bring attention to it. They don’t think people will attend to the real issue unless they whip up the fat panic … I say, have the courage to make your argument about the real issues and stop doing it on the backs of fat people.

Doing so will take a concerted political movement — one that can’t be brought to you by cable television.

By Jessica Weiss

Estancia Ranch, one of few remaining traditional pasture-based ranches in Argentina. (All photos by Jessica Weiss.)

Buenos Aires, Argentina: It’s no secret the people here love beef.

In 1958, the average Argentine consumed 216 pounds of it per year. (For context: U.S. beef consumption peaked in 1975 at 89 pounds per person.) Argentina was once the world’s fifth largest economy, due largely to the strength of its global dominance in the beef trade. Because of a grand confluence of factors including climate and natural grass diversity, Argentina was long known as a hungry cow’s heaven — and the arbiter of the world’s best beef.

But today, much of the country’s famous grasslands have been turned over to crops. Beef consumption and exports are way down. And lest you think it’s because overall meat consumption is down, irony would have it that Argentina is now the world’s No. 1 exporter of soymeal, No. 2 of corn, and No. 3 of soybeans, increasingly used as animal feed in China, where meat-eating is through the roof.

Images of cows on pasture are still common in Argentina’s guidebooks and on postcards and butcher shop windows, but cattle production now largely relies on the feedlot. As a result, a small but growing movement of consumers, providers, and environmentalists is beginning to demand the beef of days past.

The “grass” was always implied

Many scientists agree that meat consumption is intrinsically tied to climate change. And beef, lamb, and other methane-emitting ruminant animals are said to be responsible for a large portion of the greenhouse gases caused by food production. One recent study also concluded that people in the developed world must cut the amount of meat they eat in half to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas.

But in Argentina, conservationists argue that raising beef on natural grasslands is a sustainable tradition, and much better suited to the biodiversity of the grassland, called “the Pampas,” than industrial row-crop agriculture and feedlots.

Just 20 years ago, virtually all of Argentina’s cows still grazed freely. But as global agriculture markets boomed, it became harder for cattle farmers to resist the quick profit from soy, wheat, and corn. Hastened by a major financial crisis in 2001, many cattle ranchers sold their cows and turned over their land. Whereas grass-fed cows may take three to five years to be ready to sell, a farmer can turn around a soy or corn crop in a matter of months.

“Basically, cow production got pushed out of the Argentine Pampas,” says Ricardo Sager, director of scientific and technological development at Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).

To keep beef prices low on less land, the Argentine government developed legislation in the late 1990s that provided subsidies for the corn-fed to feedlot cows. Both INTA and the Argentine Beef Promotion Institute touted use of the feedlot for quick, effective production. Now, much of the country’s beef — up to 80 percent by some estimates — has been through a feedlot.

Argentine cultural ties to beef remain strong. And by most standards, Argentines still eat an enormous amount of it — an average 118 pounds per person in 2011.

“Meat in Argentina is a strategic food,” Sager says. “Like rice in Asia and corn in Mexico, everyone has to have access and it has to be cheap.”

A gaucho, or Argentinian cowboy.

Not everyone sees it that way. At one farm in Entre Rios, Argentina, ranchers are trying to turn Sager’s argument on its head, by contributing to the creation of a premium for beef for the first time ever in Argentina’s history.

There, on 65,000 acres alongside the Paraná River, 20,000 cows graze without being bothered by humans. The herd, owned by Estancia Grass Fed Beef, is one of the largest pasture-raised herds of steer in the world.

“We’re essentially working in the traditional Argentine model,” says J.P. Thieriot, the co-founder of Estancia, “which not long ago was a model for sustainable farming.”

That model, he explains, involves grazing and fertilizing by free-range cattle for five to seven years, until the ground is primed for a short (one- to two-year) crop cycle.

“Such a system is essentially eternally sustainable,” he says.

Thieriot grew up on cattle farms in Argentina and California. He says Argentina and Uruguay are really the only places in the world where it’s possible to raise such a high volume of top quality cows year round, due to the temperate climate, access to water sources, and expansive, rich grasslands. Estancia’s animals are never given antibiotics nor hormones; the soil never sees pesticides or fertilizer. The company employs local ranchers and uses innovative animal welfare techniques.

Next he’s working on branding the product. “Creating recognition will eventually create a demand, which will create a price premium,” Thieriot says, “which will make it more compelling for Argentine ranchers to keep or add cattle — instead of getting rid of them to plant wall-to-wall soy.”

Estancia sells three main, prime cuts to high-end markets and restaurants overseas: tenderloin, rib eye, and New York strip. The rest of the cow (the majority of it) enters Argentina’s domestic market, where it is sold alongside beef from a feedlot, for the same price. But there is no labeling, grading or certification infrastructure in place for meat. All farmers sell in the same market.

“So basically, customers at a grocery store in Buenos Aires are buying Estancia’s beef without knowing it,” Thieriot says. “It’s completely unlabeled.”

Some Buenos Aires chefs intentionally serve grass-fed beef, however. And customers in good relation with their butchers may be able to get it, too. But the vast majority of consumers pay no attention to the overall tenderness or distribution or color of fat, for instance, which are telltale ways to distinguish feedlot versus grass-fed. In Argentina, grass-fed beef has never needed a title or a label — the “grass” was always implied — and it’s unlikely that many consumers are aware of the difference.

Many acres of the Pampas, a traditional grassland, have been cultivated to grow industrial-scale soy.

A threatened ecosystem

Plans are in the works for the first-ever label for grass-fed beef in Argentina, which will be available this year in select towns, starting with certification of 35 farms. It’s being spearheaded by Aves Argentinas (Argentine Birds), a wildlife organization that is part of an alliance to save Argentina’s grasslands, in partnership with Fundación Vida Silvestre (The Wildlife Foundation of Argentina).

“The label will signify what we like to call ‘grassland beef,’” says conservationist Gustavo Marino, who works with Aves Argentinas. “This means meat from farms that conserve grasslands and their biodiversity.”

Cows must be fed and raised on native grasslands, with feedlot usage prohibited. To receive certification, farms will have to be registered with the Alliance and adhere to a variety of protocols.

“The idea is to offer consumers the option for a product that contributes to saving a threatened ecosystem,” Marino says.

The Pampas is one of the richest areas of grassland biodiversity in the world, with up to 200 species of grass per hectare. Historically, these grasses have attracted hundreds of species of birds and other wildlife unique to the area. But with the intensification of agriculture, this biodiversity is disappearing, Marino says.

The alliance is also working with 18 ranchers throughout the country to introduce best practices for maximizing production while promoting biodiversity, in a project funded by the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank. A pocket-sized guide to the birds and grasses of the Pampas is distributed to farmers, so that “rural producers can recognize the animals and nature of their environments.”

The challenge ahead: creating demand

Some say the creation of a premium product faces a steep uphill battle.

“For farmers, once land is converted to grain, it is a difficult proposition to revert back to pasture,” says Mike Skowronek, an American rancher in Buenos Aires.

“A soy farmer, for example, would have to skip a harvest payday to buy new cows and wait for his grass to re-grow.”

Skowronek says he’s perhaps the only rancher still committed to the grass-fed method in Tapalqué, in the middle of Buenos Aires province and once the heartland of free-range cattle. He blogs extensively about the challenges that come with grass-fed farming in modern-day Argentina.

But Marino says he is confident demand will grow the more people learn.

“Of course we’re going to have to get them interested because of the flavor first,” he says, “and then educate them about the other reasons to choose grass-fed.”

By Grist staff

Trying to get some work done? Banish the thought. It’s National Bike Month, it’s spring, and these lovely people obviously need company.

By Bryan Barney

Rodolfo Dirzo. (Photo by Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.)

If you think all ecologists are focused on the gloom and doom of climate change, think again. Some of them have even bigger things on their minds.

“I think that, given time and political will and political savviness, we might be able to fix the climate change situation,” says Rodolfo Dirzo, the Bing Professor in Ecology at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies. “But biological extinction is not a reversible thing. To me — and I know that this might be controversial — I think that biological extinction is the most dramatic global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene.”

I met Dirzo while preparing for my first class at Stanford: Field Ecology and Conservation. We were organizing the materials for experiments that we would be performing in Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve, the northernmost tropical rainforest in the Americas, located in Veracruz, Mexico. Dirzo, many years prior to his arrival at Stanford, was the director of research at the reserve. His observations there have led him to study not only the effects of deforestation, but his new line of thinking around “defaunation,” or how the loss of medium and large animals have restructures the forest understory, and ultimately shape a whole tropical ecosystem.

“Go to Los Tuxtlas and you walk in this amazing forest — it looks so lush and green and exuberant,” he says. “We don’t really see what is happening to the animals, unless you begin to really carefully start monitoring.”

In this interview, we talk about the rise of “rodentation,” the ecological version of “the living dead,” and the ethical implications of wiping out the results of 3.5 billion years of evolution.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

By Chip Giller

Dear Grist readers,

Please give to Grist today. It’s our last shot at $25K!

My staff has been struck by a curse:
We have to keep speaking in verse.
But a timely donation
Will offer salvation –
Give now, or this curse will get worse!

Grist readers, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the raven that put this curse upon us, I’m going to break from speaking in verse for just a moment so I can ask you, in all earnestness, to support Grist today with as little as $5.

We gotta get just a few more gifts by midnight to earn an additional $25,000 from a generous donor. We are so close to our goal of 3,000 gifts, and we don’t want to leave that money on the table. Please help us meet our goal and capture the gold. We don’t want to be doomed to meetings like this:

If you value our clever reporting,
And the changes that we are exhorting,
If we’ve made your life better,
And you have some spare cheddar,
Then isn’t this Grist worth supporting?

Doggerel-ly,

Chip Giller
Founder and CEO

P.S. Giving online make you a wreck? You’re also welcome to send a check: Grist, 710 Second Avenue, Suite 860, Seattle, WA 98104.

P.P.S. If we reach our goal by May 15, Grist will receive $25,000 from a generous donor.

By Douglas Gayeton

Editor’s note: If you liked the series of photos we featured from the Lexicon of Sustainability this winter, you might enjoy this video — which is one of three currently running on PBS.org.

By Scott Rosenberg

When we do these semiannual fundraising appeals here at Grist we sometimes look over at our peers in public broadcasting with envy.

When they don’t meet their goals, they extend their deadlines. They just keep going. They’re machines! We’ll just keep torturing you, they say, until you give.

We’re nicer than that. We’ve never extended our deadline. We live by the deadline here. But we don’t want to die by it.

So the deadline for this appeal is fast approaching. And, to be honest, the involuntary poetry slam that Grist has become over the last 10 days? It’s just exhausting. But you can do something about it! Give now, and put an end to our misery.

Here’s what I mean:

My first week at Grist a few months ago, this gull decided to make a home on my windowsill for the better part of a day.

It stared at me. I stared at it. It made noises at me. I tried not to make noises back.

I thought of that bird when I watched our first appeal video — the one with the Muppet-style raven harassing Grist’s founder while mouthing droll Poe parodies.

And then it hit me — the curse!

If I post here tomorrow
Things just couldn’t be the same
‘Cause Grist’s so plagued with this nonsense
And this verse you cannot change!

Yes, it has come to this: Our lyrical disease has reached an advanced stage, and Lynyrd Skynyrd has infected my brainstem.

In the next stage, I fear, it’s gonna be “Surfin’ Bird,” and we just don’t want to go there.

So take pity on us wretches. Give to Grist now — and it’ll all be over soon.

By Tove Danovich

Photo by Idit Narkis Katz.

Every July since 1926, Traverse City, Mich., has hosted a national cherry festival. The event attracts tourists to the city, which in turn calls itself “The Cherry Capital of the World,” an epithet that might seem hyperbolic if Michigan didn’t grow nearly 75 percent of the nation’s tart cherries. Also known as sour or “pie cherries,” tart cherries are bright red fruit that are traditionally frozen and processed. Most sweet cherries, on the other hand, are eaten fresh and grown in Western states.

This year it’s looking unlikely that the Cherry Festival will feature any Michigan cherries. Two 80-degree weeks in March caused blossoms to bud early, before the Midwestern winter returned with its standard frosty, below-freezing temperatures. Though many growers are still a few weeks from knowing the full extent of the weather damage, they’re looking at what could be a total loss.

Michigan’s $17 billion tourism industry will find ways around the worst of this weather-induced crisis. The National Cherry Festival’s organizers have already made plans to order the fruit from Yakima, Wash., and Cherry Republic, a Michigan-based store offering products based around cherries, went all the way to Poland to build this year’s inventory. But for growers and farmworkers who depend on summer orchard crops, a year like this means a lot more than a change in sales strategy — it’s a huge loss of income.

King Orchards is one of many family farms affected by the weather. The owner, John King, isn’t optimistic. “This year we don’t know if we’ll have any fruit at all,” he says. King explains that while insurance is available through the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program to subsidize his failed apple harvest, there is no such thing for his farm’s cherries. “An insurance payment would be less than our labor bill for the year,” he said. With a typical profit margin of 10-20 percent, it could take growers like King three to five years to recover.

While the farmers get most of the attention in the event of a failed harvest, it’s the agricultural workers who are hurt the most. A recent study by Michigan State University [PDF] showed that agriculture brings $91 billion and 923,000 jobs into the state. Michigan may be frequently cited as an example of the nation’s poor economy, but its agricultural industry, responsible for a quarter of all state income, does well when the weather cooperates.

Unfortunately for fruit-lovers, Michigan cherries are not going to be the only affected crops this year. This past March, residents of the entire Great Lakes Basin area were trying to remember how to put on shorts and sunscreen before buttoning back up in late April. Low fruit yields for New York, Pennsylvania, and Ontario are almost certain. Unseasonable weather, however nice for our tans, is rarely good for our farms. As John King said, “We had two weeks of 85-degree weather. That should frighten anybody who likes food.”

A bad year is not unheard of in agriculture. When dealing with nature, any number of factors must be in place for fruit to grow — weather conditions, pollination, and proper pest control being among the most important. In fact, Michigan faced a similar occurrence as recently as 2002 — a warm spell that decimated the tart cherry crop but left other survivors behind. But this year’s prolonged good weather is estimated to damage 50 to 90 percent of all orchard crops.

While one year of unseasonable weather could be blamed on Mother Nature’s strange whims, two of them occurring within a decade is cause for concern. If these warm springs do prove to be the start of a pattern, it could cause spiraling consequences for our food supply. In the last decade, there has been a lot of interest in funding climate-based research into the cherry industry — tart cherries in particular, since they tend to be most sensitive to weather variations. The Pileus Project and Climark started in 2003 and 2009 respectively, and both are working to study the current and potential effects of climate change on Michigan cherry production. The energy and financial backing behind such projects implies a certain amount of worry should weather events like this year’s become commonplace. Orchard crops take years to mature and require a much longer investment than row crops, or annual agricultural products like corn, which are planted every year and mature in a matter of months. Depending on the findings of these studies, growers and others relying on the cherry industry for their livelihoods may start replacing their orchards with more resilient crops.

In an interview with Great Lakes Echo, Roy Black, agricultural economist, said, “From [the grower’s] point of view, this has not been a very profitable industry for quite a while. So the bigger picture is, is this industry at a point where we ought to be reinvesting?” In other words, if this unpredictable weather keeps up, we may need to name a new Cherry Capital of the World.