By: Liz Allen
In order to be relevant to agricultural decision-makers, scenarios must account for technological innovations and changing farming practices. Here, a group of researchers and growers review direct-seed test plots at a Direct Seed field day in St. John, WA, hosted by the Palouse Rock Lake Conservation District, Cook Agronomy Farm, and the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association. Photo by Kay Meyer. Reproduced from the REACCH 2015 Annual Report.
Throughout this blog series I’ve discussed various aspects of scenario planning, from the general philosophy (part 1) to adapting global scenarios to study the impacts of climate change and development on water resources in the Pacific Northwest (Part 4). In this 5th and final installment, we’ll turn to scenarios created specifically to study changes affecting agriculture. I’ll begin by covering the international context in which these agricultural scenarios are being developed and then explore how the Regional Approaches to Climate Change (REACCH) project, a collaborative effort between UI, WSU and OSU, is refining agricultural scenarios for use in studying the possible futures of cereal production systems in the inland Pacific Northwest.