In this study, we explore the possibility that farmers are responding to the impacts of climate change with practices that increase greenhouse gas emissions. Our examination focuses on heavy rainfall events and midwestern corn farmers’ nitrogen fertilizer management. Due to climate change, the frequency and intensity of heavy rain events is increasing across the Midwest. These events increase nitrogen loss to the environment and introduces economic risks to farmers. Drawing from a theoretical framework that merges Allan Schnaiberg’s Treadmill of Production and James O’Connor’s Second Contradiction of Capitalism, we argue farmers’ responses to these events are shaped by structural political-economic pressures. We examine this potential using a qualitative sample of 154 farmer interviews across Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan from 2014.
Results/Conclusions
Interviewed farmers expressed that the agricultural system in which they operated reflected the production treadmill Schnaiberg depicts: competitive pressures drove them to continually seek to maximize profits and production in the short-term. This social structural context shaped how farmers' reacted to heavy rain events and nitrogen loss. Interviewed farmers who had experienced N loss from heavy rain events primarily used increased application rates of nitrogen fertilizer to reduce their vulnerability to heavy rains (33 of the 59 who reported experiencing N loss). Farmers' saw their use of increased N application rates as economically rational, a cheap and effective way to ensure they did not experience yield loss from N deficiency. The environmental consequences of using more nitrogen, when recognized by farmers, were secondary to profit-imperatives given competitive pressures and thus not acted upon. As nitrogen application rate is directly associated with nitrous oxide emissions, this adaptive strategy increases agricultural contributions to climate change. Our results are preliminary, but they suggest farmers may be adapting to climate change as O'Connor's contradiction of capitalism thesis predicts: Through strategies that prioritize restoring profits in the short-term, but ultimately further degrade the environmental conditions necessary for production (and life on the planet).