White jujube flowers shriveled up and fell off Alisha Taff’s trees during the summer, and all she could do was watch.
“The type of fruit tree I have is really resilient,” Taff said. “It’s the perfect tree to grow out here but the extreme duration and heat temperatures in July were very impactful. … When it’s 118 degrees, that’s unprecedented.”
Taff owns Just Jujubes, a Cuyama-based farm that grows the drought-tolerant plant on 320 acres. Cuyama farmers will typically see hot days during the summer, but this year’s heat wave was detrimental to farmers like Taff.
“We’re in the middle of what should be their harvest season, but I have the lowest yield I’ve ever had,” Taff told the Sun in September. “When all the flowers were fried off in July, even though my trees do bloom continuously through the summer, when they’re damaged from a two-week period, they pull back. It’s just too shocking to [their] system.”
In July, the valley saw a 10-day stretch above 100 degrees, with multiple days at or above 110 degrees—too hot even for the jujube.
In a good year, Taff said she can harvest 50 to 100 pounds per tree, but she didn’t think the farm would even harvest 10 pounds per tree—not enough to cover operational costs.
“This is what should be the time of year where we sell our fruit and that’s used to cover our expenses for the year. It’s used to pay salaries to people accustomed to working this time of year; it has a trickle-down effect,” she said. “It’s not just farmers, it trickles down to suppliers, production, transportation companies, box companies, and all of those people along the way that get people’s food to the market.”
Researchers from UCSB suggest that the rising temperatures and strange weather conditions will only become more frequent and more extreme as time goes on. Many Cuyama Valley farmers are figuring out how to bounce back from a year marked by higher temperatures, water use restrictions, poor water quality, and infrequent rain.
“I see it challenging for farmers,” Taff said. “You can’t continue the way you’ve always done things.”
Jean Gaillard, a local vegetable farmer, planted leeks, onions, and several other crops earlier in the winter to try and avoid the high temperatures after the summer heat wave hurt crops and killed several chickens raised for meat and eggs.
“A winter garden is a gamble because you cannot predict the weather, if it’s going to be cold, freezing; the only thing we can do is monitor the weather,” Gaillard said.
To help the seedlings survive, he built 12-foot-tall hoop tunnels and has blankets to cover the seedlings to help lock in the moisture and heat. Their chickens are now in an old water trough 2.5 feet high on blocks so animals can’t get in and their temperatures can be closely monitored.
“It’s really monitoring the weather and hoping things are going to work out and if a seed starts and freezes, you start again. That’s basically how we’ll go about this,” Gaillard said. “I started this year, and I’ve had to replant three times until I figured it out.”
Gaillard and his wife, Meg Brown, grow and sell their produce to local vendors and at farmers’ markets but found it hard to keep up with competition this summer. Celery grew barely a foot tall, when it’s supposed to be 1.5 to 2 feet tall; red beets were hard instead of tender; and honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelon flowers were damaged during their pollination period—stopping production altogether, Gaillard said.
Fall crops, like butternut and pumpkin squashes, pollinate during the summer, but the heat fried the flowers, like Taff’s jujube trees. The couple’s tree fruits—persimmons, peaches, plums, and apples—had a very strong year in contrast.
“When you have extreme weather, you know certain products are not going to make it, but others can,” he said.
Brown told the Sun that “in this past year” the U.S. Department of Agriculture classified Cuyama as a region for crops that can grow in 90 to 100 degrees, as opposed to its historical classification for crops from 80 to 90 degrees.
“That’s a huge jump; even the USDA has recognized this shift in heat,” Brown said. “When we first got here, we would have a heat wave of three to four days and go to a normal temperature, high still but not normal. But this year we had seven to nine days of 105-plus degrees, and the evening didn’t cool off as much as it normally does.”
Laura Harrison, a climate hazards specialist with UC Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center, told the Sun that a heat wave’s impacts on plants have to do with insufficient moisture.
“While plants do have their own tolerance level for high temperatures, some will not fare well at all if temps are above 100 degrees for multiple days,” Harrison said. “For some plants, if they are exposed beyond certain temperature thresholds, they are just going to have more severe impacts where they will begin dropping their young fruits, or just kind of abort the reproductive processes, and then there’s really no going back.”
The Climate Hazards Center monitors rainfall, temperatures, and the impacts of drought or extreme rainfall on food security in regions around the world that need humanitarian aid, she said. Her primary focus has been in Africa, where many countries rely on rainfall to water crops and have experienced severe drought during their summer.
“Crops, in this case corn, had a rough time,” she said. “Flowers aren’t forming, cobs not filling adequately, cobs not developing at all.”
Wheat in Northwestern Africa took a hit as did in corn and soybean yields in Ukraine, thanks to hot and dry spells in July: “2024 certainly has a number of examples we can learn from, and I think there’s a lot of attention on the importance of temperatures and temperature changes these days, and I think that’s well justified,” she said.
While hot and dry conditions have been something that farmers worldwide look out for, the problem is getting worse and could occur more frequently with time, she said. Adding mulch to lock in soil moisture; changing which seed varieties are planted; diversifying crops; and using hoop tunnels to keep in humidity are a few things that Harrison could see benefiting farmers as they adapt to climate change.
“I think this really is an important opportunity to learn what’s working … expanding and helping others implement in areas that will continue to be impacted,” Harrison said.
Reach Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 12-22, 2024.
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