Farmer Wants a Wife? Farmer Wants a Crop!

It is rare to find TV reality shows bumping heads with cutting edge science. But it happened last week with two unrelated releases…

 The CW network played the finale of its dating reality show, “Farmer Wants a Wife.”

 And The Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) released “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate.”

 What do they have in common? Well, the CCSP report showed that we will be seeing more and more violent weather events as a result of global warming. And the farmer? Well, he seems to be suffering from the sort of violent weather that the report focuses on---a dose of reality for reality TV…

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Matt Neustadt---the farmer who wants a wife---did not get a chance to watch his show’s finale because he was desperately trying to save his crops from impending flood waters: 

"We were trying to cut wheat late that night because of the high water they were predicting," Neustadt said.

Forty percent of his family farm is under water right now and he will lose most of this year’s crops. His farm sits near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, so occasional floods are not a surprise:

"I'm not going to complain too much; that's just part of living in a flood plain," he said.

That’s a healthy response, but shouldn’t the CCSP report be setting off alarm bells here? More violent weather. More tornadoes. More hurricanes. More floods.

While the mantra remains that no specific weather event can be attributed to global warming, Newsweek reports on an Iowa State professor who claims that the floods in his area are directly tied to global warming. 

So we are likely to hear the terms “500-year floods” and “storms of the century” bandied about more often.

We already use floodplain maps to determine limitations on where to build, flood insurance, and added environmental regulations. The impact of flooding is also noted in broader 100- and 500-year flood plains. (Contrary to the straight-forward naming, a 100-year flood is not the biggest storm in a century; it relates to the percent chance that waters will inundate an area in a 100 year time span.)  

Given the potential for more frequent flooding, it might be time to re-map those flood plains. FEMA had already started the process---but they were focused on crumbling infrastructure. But the climate change news makes these discussions all the more important as those lines are redrawn and billions in flood relief dollars are dolled out after the waters recede.

Otherwise, down the line farmers like Matt might be looking for more than just a wife… They might be looking for new farms, farm houses, and farm land…