Planning for Climate Change on your Farm
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EmailFebruary 28, 2025
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This session will help you think through climate-related risks on your farm and make a plan to prepare for heavy rains, wind, drought, heat or floods. First, we will brainstorm the biggest concerns for your farm, such as crop stress from unpredictable rains, wind damage to hoophouses, heat risks for farmworkers and much more. Then you will make a few options for what you can do to keep people, plants, livestock and infrastructure safe on your farm. There will be a breakout room, discussions and shared documents to help you talk through your fears and inform your plans to prepare your farm for climate change. We will use these tools: https://www.adaptationfellows.net/resources-1 .
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/
Video Transcript
Welcome, everybody. Happy Friday. I Appreciate everyone coming out for today's session as part of the MI Ag Ideas to Grow with Conference. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsor, AgriStrategies, LLC. In fact, I see Steve has actually joined us today and he's got some information here that you can access via the QR code, so you're on the slide. There's also the website to agristrategies.com, and feel free to reach out and check out that information from Steve and we greatly appreciate his sponsorship. He's been a sponsor here of the MI Ag Ideas to Grow with Conference for the last several years. And then also wanted to highlight that we do have resources for managing farm stress. We know that tough economic times have been experienced for various different areas of production, and in some cases, there are some volatility still exist out in some of the marketplaces, and just wanted to let people know that we do have resources to help if you're looking for how to work through some of the stressful situations you may be experiencing on farm, and you can access that either through the link we have here on the screen or also through the QR code. Those are all the housekeeping things I have for everybody. I'm going to go ahead and stop my share and turn things over to Katie and Marlee. Thanks, Jon, for welcoming us. It's exciting to be here today and I appreciate you guys taking the time out of your day to join us as we have an interactive session today on climate adaptation planning. Um I'm Marlee Giacometti. I'm a program specialist for American Farmland and Trust's Midwest team. I am also the program coordinator for a climate and adaptation and mitigation fellowship, which is how I met Katie and how I got to be here today, very appreciative of those connections. Yeah, just to give folks a quick overview of who AFT is if you're not familiar, American Farmland Trust is a is a national nonprofit that is organized, dedicated to three tenants of agriculture. And so we aim to save the land that sustains us by protecting farmland, keeping farmers on the land, and promoting sound farming practices. And so a lot of the work that I do falls under that last umbrella where I support climate adaptation and crop diversification efforts across the Midwest. I'm based in Illinois, so a lot of my work is centered there, but I'm often all over the region, and a lot of this work that I do is within the context of vegetable and small fruit production, but also perennial cropping systems and other practices that can strengthen farm resilience in the region. And so if you have any questions about any of that, please feel free to reach out to me. Happy to talk veg or perennials with anyone after this. Also just really quick, under this work that I do at AFT, I'm a program coordinator for the climate adaptation and mitigation Fellowship. This is a program developed in partnership with AFT, the University of Maine, and the USDA Climate Hubs. CAMF is a two year program that's peer to peer learning and it pairs farmers and ag service providers up across the Northeast and the Midwest and through this time, they work together to develop climate adaptation plans and do some skill building related to talking about climate change and what's happening on their farms with their communities. Much of my role there consists of offering courses similar to this, as well as working one on one with farmers and advisors to support their climate adaptation planning process. Um, with that, I'm going to pass it back to Katie. She's got a quick slide here before we get into the actual bones of the climate adaptation planning process. Great. I just dropped my info into the chat and then the link to the tool that we're going to be using today. So I'm Katie Brandt with the MSU Organic Farmer Training Program. We just started with our 2025 group on Monday. We've got 28 amazing folks, and so that's a mix of hands on learning in Detroit and East Lansing. As well as field trips to about 20 farms, and we have online days too where we hear from 25 or so farmer guest speakers, as well as a lot of time into planning for people's farms. If that's a good fit, I'm open to people reaching out to me. So I also co lead Michigan's Transition to Organic Partnership Program, if you're looking for a mentor or events to help you transition your practices to organic. I also work with SARE, USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education to advise farmers on their grants and help beginning farmers in a variety of ways. So with that, with those introductions, I'd like to welcome the folks who are here. We've got people from Byron, unfortunately, experienced dry fields affecting grazing. We've got shorter hotter summers, up in Washington State. Then Menominee, Michigan was very dry. I know the sugar maples have been very affected by the ways our winters and springs have been going, so we'll get a chance to dive into all of those. Go ahead, Marlee. Yeah, just jumping back to the climate adaptation planning process that I mentioned, I want to just give, just a quick high level overview of what this looks like in practice through our program and also just acknowledging that there's a lot of ways to plan and adapt for climate related impacts on the farm. It's not we don't want to make it prescriptive because farms look very different across the state. They look different, you know, just across soil types. And so this is more of just a framework that any farm could plug into and customize it to make it fit their operation and the goals of their farm in the long term. And with that little preface, the CAMF planning process is essentially like a 7.8 point planning process that we like to suggest for farmers. We do a lot of our education around this planning process, and, um, It is a tool that we have developed through this program. It's free to the public and it's on our website in three different formats. We have an Excel version, a Word doc version that's easy to print and bring out to the field with you and to be able to write versus inputting data into a spreadsheet. We also have a Google Sheets version, which is the same as the Excel version, but just different platform. And so, we also offer a completed example for folks to reference as they develop their own plans. I will really quick go through each one of these briefly, but wanted to mention that there's one on here that's not included, and that is a big part of this planning process, which is the finances. The first part of this climate planning process is to conduct a risk assessment on the farm. We have a guided risk assessment sheet that we'll all be doing together in this session today, but that's the first step. That will allow you to understand where your strengths and weaknesses are on the farm. Identify vulnerabilities and be able to use that information and understand and what options you have to address those risks and potentially climate impacts down the road. And so that's the option identification portion, which is where you can organize your ideas and brainstorm practices to implement and understand what the anticipated effects are. We'll also do another short interactive activity on co creating option identification pages together. But some of the elements that we're not going to touch on today in great detail are the trade off assessment, the implementation, as well as the monitoring and assessment long term of the practices that you're interested in adopting on the farm. And then we'll also, you know, as a larger part of this is to keep it an iterative process because Climate impacts sometimes are really unpredictable and understanding that the process may change, your planning strategy may change and operation itself may change over time. Keeping this open and flexible to be an iterative process in the long term is very crucial and that's why we have the sixth and seventh items on this little circle here just to talk about what you're seeing and what you're doing on the farm as well as being flexible to revise that if you need to. I mentioned too, we do also that's not included in this is a partial budget analysis, which is available in this tool as well. This can help folks understand the cost of implementing a new practice and how it will affect the finances on a higher level, from a higher level perspective. It allows you to organize and understand what practices may fit in the budget or which ones might be impractical to implement right now, but could be an opportunity to start planning long term financially or to start identifying grants or appropriate programs that can align and help you get some funding to implement these practices. I will drop a quick link here for the tool if anybody wanted to download the full tool. It's available at adaptationfllows.net and like I said, there's a completed example and a couple of formats that you're welcome to download if you find it interesting. With that, I'm going to take a breath and just share really quick to this is kind of a crash course in climate adaptation planning, and for new and beginning farmers, I think it's really important to consider, just the timing of climate adaptation planning and implementation. It can be a really long and iterative process, and, um, Yeah. Just something to consider is if you have specific practices in mind that implementing those might have to happen at certain times of the year or throughout different times throughout the growing season. Be mindful of that, as well as understanding where maybe your opportunities for learning are and to reach out for technical assistance for those. The one thing that we really don't want to recommend is for folks to We want to make sure that folks feel empowered to try new things on the farm, but we don't want them to feel like they have to go into it not being supported. Reaching out for technical assistance, having an expert or even a farmer mentor that you know of that can provide some insight into their own experience or some technical service can really help ease this process. Um, and just some more fluid, flexible things to consider as you dive into a climate adaptation or planning process, is that making connections with people who are experiencing similar things on their farms or who have already gone through those things, or collaborating with extension or other organizations who are here to support that work is crucial. And so You know, just to uplift the value of collaboration and relationships in this planning process is really, I think what helps build resilience in the long term. Lastly, this feels like a big challenging topic, especially when it comes to farms and management of operations in the long term, especially with weather impacts and climate impacts on crops being ever changing and really sometimes can be a big question mark. I think it's really important to remember that small changes on the farm can make a really big difference in the long run. Just to not sell yourself short, if you're thinking that implementing a small change on the farm might not have a big impact, um, that that might not be the case. Just being open and flexible to these, um, to these different ideas that could potentially make your farm more resilient in the long term is really helpful. With that, I will pass it to Katie and we're going to dive right into the risk assessment portion of this, of this session. Yeah, take it away, Katie. Thanks. Fantastic. Thanks, Marlee. I'm going to drop into the chat right now. If everybody wants to take a moment to follow the link as long as you're not driving or doing something where you shouldn't be using your screen, that would be great. Then right below that link, you'll see I've got a numbered list by name or your Zoom name. What you're going to be doing, if you can go to the flip to page, Marlee, or I could share my screen. Oh, thanks. Perfect. Can everyone see that well? Do people need it a little bigger? What you'll do is you will follow the link. For now, let's all follow the link that says example risk, which is in orange at the top. I see a lot of folks are in the room. What you'll see here, this is almost exactly like the blank version you have except I wrote in who's filling out the assessment, Katie Brandt, and now I'm going to put it out to those in the room. If someone's willing to open up your mic and be our example for for the group before we go on to our next activity of everyone being able to go through this process on their own. Is anybody feeling brave today? We had some good examples in the chat that I'd love to think through. This is Lucy. I will be your guinea pig. Oh, thank you, Lucy. I appreciate that. You're kind to me. Great. Lucy. Farm name? Blueberry Pier. Fantastic. I already put the date in. Now, this climate risk factor bank will be filled in for everyone that you see in gray. These are options. It's not everything though. You may be having different climate impacts on your farm than is listed. What I did was I went in and put in what I thought would be the top risk factors. If we scroll down a little bit, we can see high temperatures, high precipitation, drought, wind, flooding, and pests and disease, as well as other. So I'm curious, Lucy, which of these are risks at your farm? Wait a minute. I'm trying to I should be following on your screen and not my screen, correct? Yeah. Marlee, can you scroll down a little bit or I could share my screen if yeah, there you go. Perfect. Okay. Okay. So what were they again? Yeah. So just kind of this column B, the second column is a list of what I thought might be Common challenges here in Michigan, high temperature. Yeah. We get we had drought last year drought very windy where we are. Okay. We don't have too much flooding. Part of part of our what do you call it? We have some flooding if we have a large amount of snow because we have a clay loam, so it takes longer for it to go into the ground. And I grow in hoop houses like you have behind you. And we did do we did raise the floor, though it didn't flood as much as it did. Okay. So Marlee can probably take use of that raising the floor of the hoop house as one of the options that we talked about in a bit. So if drought is a risk for you, What concerns or problems does this create on the farm? What does that mean for blueberries when they're exposed to drought? Do you just see lower yields or do they? Well, we have some we have we have a large amount of items to go on on our farm because we started out as a blueberry farm and the deer ate it. So we grow in cages. So we have blueberries, raspberries, red currants, black currants. And this year, we just didn't have the what do you call it production because we also do vegetables inside of our hoop houses. So, you know, we grow garlic, we grow squash, at least 20, 30 different kinds of vegetables we grow. And this year, because of the drought and we also have grapes. We have concrete grapes that's older than the hills because it's they were brought with my grandparents. And those didn't do as well as they usually do. They are so hot inside the hoop houses. Everything dried up faster than it usually does. So that was extremely it was a tough year. It was a short season this year is what it was because of it. Okay. Great. So in this column C, what concerns or problems does this create on the farm? For high temperatures, I'm putting heat in the hoop house, for drought, I'm putting that the grapes didn't do well. I'm guessing probably that it's going to affect you. Everything. I don't know. The raspberries was very short season. Usually, they go for quite a long time and that was a very short season with them this year because of the drought. Same thing with the current. Yeah. I mean, terrible for you, but great info and example for this. I Okay. So hopefully people kind of have an idea what this column is for. Let's go on to the next column for drought. Are there any benefits on your farm from drought? I know in a droughty year for me growing vegetables, I see that there tends to be less disease. Do you have any benefits like that? Yeah, we might have had less disease, but we had more bugs. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, those insects will have a faster life cycle when it's warmer for sure. I don't know if that's for the currents. I'll put that for the vegetables. More insect pests. So there's usually, unfortunately, not as many benefits as problems. So we can go on to column E. What resources do we already have to address this risk? So do you have irrigation at your site at all? Yes. We well, see, that's your problem because I only use rainwater inside the hoop houses because if I use well water, then we get a high salt content inside of the hoop houses, so I only use rainwater. So I had a what do you call a not give it rainwater was more or less what's the word I'm looking for here? Rationed than just giving it all the time. So I had to ration it because we didn't have as much rain in between where we were supposed to because otherwise, I can fill up the tanks with 1 " of rain on the on the buildings, the tanks, and they are at 350 gallon tanks. So, you know, so we had less water, but we do irrigation. We did do what do you call it mulching to try to keep the the ground from drying out. So we did do that. I That's that was yeah. We have we do have drip hoses inside of them inside all the hoops. Yeah. And that drip will definitely save you on water since you're relying just on the on the rainwater. So those are all good examples. Would you say, Lucy, that drought is your worst risk you're aware of due to climate change or would you rank it? Where would you rank it if one is the worst, the highest risk, and seven is the lowest? Yeah. That would be our highest would be the drought conditions. It would be our highest. Our least amount of would be wind even though it does dry out. I mean, today we got 40 mile an hour winds today up and down here. I know. My kids keep saying you should put a windmill in, but I don't think the airport would appreciate it because we live next door to the airport. That can certainly be a risk for hoop houses. I've known growers who've had their hoop houses damaged and even destroyed by wind. I have had that in the past, my first hoop house after finishing building it, October, we have an extreme wind outfit and it ripped everything apart. We've gone to a different style hoop houses with being anchored better than the first one, and that is worked out. We have a Rimmel that's lasted through all the hoop winds and Farmers Srands. Our farm cac once fell apart three times. So Don't be Farm tech bad. They don't they just they just the way they're built and having high winds, they just rattle everything apart. They don't stay stuck. And the way Rimmel is is bolted together, it stays good. And the way that farmers Farm tech or Farmers friends, they have smaller size hoops, but the way that they are roped down and anchored to the ground, they have gone through 50 mile an hour winds not budge. So we've gone from one company to another one to keep them not blowing away, I should say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Lucy, for being willing to share like that. I think it was a good example for the group. Before we spend some time each of us working on our own section, let's go back to the flip to your page page in your screen sharing. Can you show along the bottom, Marlee, how there's different tabs and you want to be in the flip to your page, which is the very first one on the far left. I So we'll go to that and we'll just do let's do let's see. Why don't we do 5 minutes solo to work on your own risk assessment. You'll just click on, for example, Kathy, I've got Kathy down as number eight. She would click on eight risk, and that's her very own table that she can go through, whereas Sarah would click on the one that says ten risk because it says ten, Sarah. Any questions before we have some time for that brainstorming? All right. I'd love to offer some considerations as well when thinking about the risk assessment. A lot of times it's really obvious when we have weather related impacts that we can see that affect us financially. But I would also encourage folks to think about, um, self care and labor associated with some of these tasks too, especially related to high heat, wind, other weather related impacts. If you or your farm crews have vulnerabilities there, those are important to consider in this risk assessment too, especially related to heat stroke, health impacts related to high temperatures, working in hoop houses or greenhouses. That's just one example. But, thinking broadly is helpful for this exercise. Let you all work independently now. All right. I was flipping through and I saw some some really deep thinking that folks are doing in these. Thanks so much to those of you that could. I know some folks might just be listening in and that's fine too. Does anyone want to share a bit with the group? We can share a screen and show what you've come up with or not as you prefer? Any volunteers? This is Kathy. Yeah. I could share a little bit. I'm a little bit different out there in the Southwest Washington area. We have the wildfire issue and I don't know if Michigan does, but one of the challenges not only am I incurring, but also other farmers on the Oregon and California is grapes with the wildfires are starting to come out with more of a smoky wine taste or smoky in the grapes. I'm not sure quite how to get around that. You know, I'm a small smaller farm, so it's my production is not as huge, but that is an issue in our area. And then we've been having extreme heat the end of July, 100 degrees, 110, 115. And it just toasts a lot of stuff. We also have livestock, we have goats, trying to keep the livestock cool and not extreme heat is a challenge. I mean, one of the things they suggested is putting ice in the water buckets, fans, which we do, just trying to get the air movement around, but it's weather is changing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like it's really creating some challenges for you in particular. Is there I am not a wine drinker myself, so I don't know. Does that make the wine completely unmarketable or are there some uses for which those stronger flavored wines can be used? Well, they're coming out with smoky wine flavors. Okay. You know, I'm marketing that, so it does give it a different flavor in the wine in the roses and the white wines. The dark wine is a little bit easier to deal with, but I know that they're trying to come up with some ideas. And we juice a lot of ours. We haven't done the wine thing yet, but I can taste it in the juice. So I'm just not quite sure how to get around that. So and that's a health risk for you and any farm workers or family members as well. The livesmoke even. Yeah. Yeah. When we there the fires the smoke blows into our area, we have not had to evacuate, but we've been put on notice. So, you know, it's it's a problem out here in the West. Well, they different from you guys? We did have not local wildfires, but we did have smoke coming in from Canada. That was one of the farms I work with just has a standard. If it's above 90 degrees or if the air quality is considered unhealthy, they close the farm for that day until it's better. And so I I support people making that choice, but it is a hard choice to make. Exactly. Any thoughts or questions for Kathy from you, Marlee, or from anyone in the group? No, I appreciate you sharing, Kathy. I'm curious about the health impacts related to that too. Have they been advising on health and safety in the field or designated times to be out that are safer than other times or Yeah. I'm just curious how different states approach those strategies, knowing that there's effects to livestock and human health. These in our summers are actually, it's usually light by five in the morning. So they encourage people to start work at between five and noon. So that's how we get around it. Usually, the smoke gets worse in the afternoon when it's hotter. So everybody stops working about noon. That's the yes the time anyway, eat lunch and take a nap. That's how we get around it as far as people and health wise, and they come out with health alerts when it gets super smoky. Does that help? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it. I'm just always curious. Smoke is an interesting one that I've had friends who work out in California and they're out in the fields with N 95, some states have more, um, you know, more sound, not that that's not a sound strategy, but just different strategies across geographies. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I think it's whatever you're used to. Up here, our climate in Southwest Washington is normal summers are about 80 to 90. Southern California, they're used to the hotter weather, so they may have different safety requirements with the labor. Yeah. But for us in the Southwest, we have nine months of rain. So our summers are really short. We do July, August, September, and October, but not really. So we have to really watch the growing season. Yes. Short window of time to be able to get your food out and makes it extra tricky too, the timing of it all. Yeah. Transition to option ID? Perfect. Okay. Did you have any other comments, Katie? I was going to say the same thing you did. Okay. Perfect. I know I'm like, I looked at the clock and I'm like oh my gosh, we're running short on time. I won't talk too much at you all, but just wanted to give a quick overview of what the next phase in this planning process can look like. I'm going to share my screen and just go over an example really quick. If we want to have a volunteer or I can just walk you through this process and we can work independently, that's fine too. Let me just share so you all see what I see. So yes, this is the next phase after the risk assessment is completed. Normally, if you're working in the camp planning tool, these risks in row six will automatically populate based on what number you deem the highest priority for each risk. And so it'll usually pull the first most high priority risk in the top box, and then it will be the subsequent risks going down the list. And so this gives you some space and some organization to brainstorm potential adaptation strategies that fit or address that risk that you've identified. There's some space for you to include notes, maybe where in the field these practices may go, times of the year for implementation, you know, anything that's related to that practice and what it may look like on the farm. And then column E is the anticipated effects from that practice. And so I know it says mitigation here. Adaptation and mitigation can sometimes be used interchangeably, but there is a distinct difference of what adaptation means versus what mitigation means. For folks, I mean, I think farmers are more focused on adaptation generally than mitigation. Mitigation is typically pretty Cost prohibitive at times and big picture visioning for greenhouse gas emissions reductions on the farm. If mitigation is an interest, I'm happy to talk after this about it and I'll share my contact information. But for the purposes of this exercise, let's pretend that this column E says adaptation effects. Just as a reminder, adaptation is defined up here. It is the means anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action to prevent or minimize the anticipated damage. That is going to be the framing of this exercise and probably some of the strategies that are attainable to implement on the farms. I apologize if that felt really vague in explaining that, but it may make more sense as we dive into it. So let's say drought is the most concerning risk on the farm. This is where you would list the strategies that may work, and these are strategies that are new to the farm. If I could use Lucy as an example, again, Lucy mentioned that drought is one of the biggest risks on the farm, but there's already a water catchment system and some drip irrigation on the farm already. We don't want to list those things because they're already implemented. They're probably worked into the financials and the overall operation and production of the crops on the farm, and we want to think about potential new strategies to implement. For addressing drought, we could do These are big picture things, but there could be more opportunity for additional drip line. There could be some strategies to move crops around to make them less prone to drought risks. That could look like moving crops into hoop houses or moving them into irrigated parts of the field where water access is easier than maybe farther fields away. I'm just brainstorming things. It's hard to have to be rooted in specific practices when it's a hypothetical situation. But those are a couple of the examples. I'm just going to put drip lines in here and I'm going to put, let's say, let's move crops into a hoop house. We'll assume that hoop house does have overhead drip, depending on the crop. These can be for some notes, let's say, where in the fields they'll go. Let's just put the Southwest field, for example. I know folks sometimes name different fields according to their organization or strategy, but we'll just keep it vague for now. Let's say some of the anticipated effects from this is less drought conditions, obviously. Let's say yield boost. Often I feel like for me personally, what I've seen, we have really droughted out crops that I don't prioritize watering. Sometimes I'll still get a harvest, but the quality will be more poor. Thus the shelf life will be more poor of those crops. So we can just then say increase shelf life of produce as a benefit from this practice. That's a very vague example, but this is just a way to organize these different risks and identify potential practices that are attainable within the next year to five years. That way we can plan for the long term too and have this fit into an attainable, uh, strategy instead of trying to do it all in one season. We often try to do that because it's exciting and also sometimes it feels urgent. But this can allow us to make calculated steps in making changes on the farm. This is just a quick example. Same with pests and diseases. We would go through and do very similar exercise where we would identify different strategies, For pests and diseases, it's really hard because sometimes they come in through insects, sometimes they're soil derived, sometimes they come through wind and identifying where those pests are originating from and finding strategies that can support the minimization of those can be identified in this section as well. We have 10 minutes left, so I'm not going to continue talking, but we can co create one together if that's helpful or if you all want to work independently, we do have corresponding sheets for the option identification component of this. Let me get back to the beginning of the spreadsheet. One of the things I'll point out is the original tool did link from risk to options, but I didn't know about that and it's not doing that in the Google Sheets. I think they're all linking to the first sheet that we did as an example. You can just type in your biggest risk or you can use the categories they have. It's totally up to you. I did fix that problem for Jacqueline and Kathy. Sheets number three and eight, if either of you Jacqueline, would you maybe be willing to be a volunteer to talk about your farms options? And really anyone could do it. We can use the farm that I work on. Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay. I'm not sure what you'd like me to do, though. And that's sheet number three. Oh, great. So you got to it. Yes. But we want to pull up the option ID. But I guess first to just understand high temp, low precipitation, wind, seem to be the high priority, risks on the farm. And so for high temp, do you have any notable things, Jacqueline, that seem like easy to implement or things that you're already thinking about for the farm to address high temperatures and impacts to crops related to high temps? So we're looking at retrofitting a greenhouse with sheet cloth to help mitigate some of the damage there. That's an excellent example. This would be where we would first put that strategy, and of course, it's going to correspond with that climate risk. If there's any notes here, this could be related to purchasing, it could be related to timing, what certain times of the year you want that shade cloth on or off. It could be related to labor too, who's going to put that shade cloth on or who's going to take it off when those times come. Then for the anticipated effects, Yeah. Can you share a little bit about what's in that greenhouse, potentially, what benefit you might see with the crops that are growing in that greenhouse if you do get a shade cloth? So we grow native plants, and I imagine using a shade cloth would reduce desiccation and the amount of water we would need to use. Beautiful. Yeah, there you have it. That's a prime example of how you can use this page to brainstorm and understand the cause and effect with these practices. Of course, we can't predict the future, we can't totally know what's going to happen by implementing these practices, but we can leverage the resources that we have and these tools to organize our thoughts around them and be able to somewhat anticipate if it's going to one, support the farm business and the farm on the ground as well. I know we have 5 minutes left. Do we have time to keep working through this or do folks want to take the rest of it, ask questions? Yeah, I'm here to be flexible. Yeah, me as well. One thing I will add, if anyone wants to go through this process with support, I'm a person here in Michigan that can do that. I think Marlee certainly has more expertise than me, but is leading a lot of folks to do advising and going through this process. I'm here too. If there's questions or support, happy to meet one on one with people. Yeah, I'll put my contact information in the chat before we end here. I have a question if I may. Yeah. Anyone put thought into those aspects of our climate that are most likely to change over the next 20 years? Do you mean in regards to Temperature strategies or modeling of climate? No. Just, you know, what is it that we might anticipate would have to be dealt with now that will be hard to be dealt with when it's here? I believe the NCA five, which is the National Climate Assessment for farmers, is a really helpful tool that can help understand the anticipated effects of climate and that can then help farmers inform what practices may or may not be available or opportunities to address those stressors. Unfortunately, nobody knows when or where these impacts are going to happen, but the modeling that we do have and unfortunately it is at risk right now of You know, with the current federal funding situation, some of those tools and programs are at risk, but as of right now, they're all available and can help point direction to resources and modeling of temperature changes as well as precipitation changes over the next ten to 20 years. Do you have a link to MCA five? I will find it for you and I can drop it in the chat. Thanks. Yeah. Great question. Thanks for asking. Any other questions out there? I think this is one of these difficult challenges on farms that talking to farms farmers right in your neighborhood might be good. They're aware of what risks are impacting them and what they've done to try and manage it as well. Well, thanks so much to everyone for being here. This is going to be a big part of keeping local and national food systems strong, is to have farmers who know what to do to manage their risks and it can help your farm to be more viable and happier place as well. Thank you, Marlee. Of course. Now, if there's any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm usually pretty quick with email. But yeah, if there's any questions after this, happy to answer questions about the planning tool, the process, specific practices. Yeah, I'm available and happy to help. Yeah, I hope this has been useful time for everyone. You're free to continue using that tool as long as you would like. It's yours. You can also download the full tool that Marlee had put a link to earlier. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you all. Take care.
