We're Melting
“These strawberries are going off in this heat. If you want a flat you can have them, but you’ll have to go through them. They’re getting fuzzy and mushy.”
Nothing turns fruits and vegetables to a liquid goo faster than high heat and humidity. After catching a few hours of sun and bruising from thoughtless shoppers testing for ripeness, peaches develop a five o’clock shadow making them unfit for the food bank. White mycelium knits the drupelets of sweaty berries into a solid mass. And cucumbers—slime city!
The current temperatures, the current state of the berries and the current forecast mean that on Sunday after market and farm chores I was up past midnight canning strawberry jam out of what was salvageable. Had they been left until morning instead of jam I’d be cleaning up a runny mess because once produce goes off nothing stops that process. Nor did I want to be boiling jars in my kitchen when it was 95 degrees outside. Mission accomplished and the freest of the free ranging poultry ate large as I tossed the persistence of fruit into the front yard.
I’ll be enjoying delicious fruit grown by my friendly market neighbor come winter, but the following few days of brutally hot weather shattering record temperatures in 35 cities throughout the country has me wondering how the changing climate is going to affect our food system on both local and global scales.
116 degrees in Portland, Oregon. There are a lot of sheep in Oregon. It’s 95 (feels like 104) at the farm right now. A few hours ago I walked down to the barn to check on everyone. Even though the sheep are sheared they are still couched down in the shade, panting, and barely noticing as I walk by when normally I’d be mobbed for the treats always keep in my pockets. Twice as much access to water has been set up because the livestock are drinking twice as much water. The rest of the animals have followed the sheep’s lead opting to move as little as possible except in the cooler hours of the day and then only for a drink. Hot poultry are the saddest. They crouch with their wings held away from their bodies panting with each breath. They don’t want to expend any energy which means they’ll quit laying eggs until the heatwave passes.
Some won’t make it. If anyone is going to expire, they’re more likely to do so on the hottest days of the years (likewise on the coldest) and when this happens, like the strawberries it’s best to take care of it as soon as possible to avoid a bigger mess. Catching me doing my rounds on Tuesday during the hottest part of the day my neighbor sent me a text telling me I was “crazy”. Nope, just farming.
While the critters have the wherewithal to get out of the sun, the crops do not and they certainly don’t pick themselves. Farmers are in overdrive assessing what must be picked immediately, keeping crops watered, shaded, ventilated so they can bring the best possible products to market. Work schedules are adjusted to early mornings and evenings so workers aren’t out in dangerous conditions at worst and miserable at least.
Producers in the northwest, however, are coming to grips with their entire crop for the season being decimated by blistering temperatures so early in their growing season or worse, entire orchards dying off due to extreme heat. Farmers are on the frontlines of these unprecedented weather. Could you imagine going to the farmers market—not just Central Farm Markets, but all farmers markets and not finding a single apple or cherry or cucumber? If you local crop was destroyed due to the heat how much do you think the cost of those goods would rise because they would need to be transported from somewhere else? Pundits are quick to attribute the cost of goods to the current political climate, but I can guarantee that’s not the type of climate that will drive up the cost of food.
I don’t have answers for such questions, but these are the sorts of things that keep me up at night making jam when I should be sleeping.