Climate and Ag in the news
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The Georgia Farm Monitor has an interesting 3-minute video on continuing clean-up activities of Georgia pecan farmers following the devastation from Hurricane Irma, which not only blew down many nuts but also uprooted trees and damaged equipment. Supplies of replacement trees are also limited due to the high demand. You can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CbIQLYfDGQ&feature=em-subs_digest. …
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Since the Super Bowl is this weekend, the USDA thought it would be fun to share some facts about how the Super Bowl shaped the chicken industry. Thanks to Growing Georgia for bringing it to my attention.
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The January Crop Progress and Condition Report for Georgia was released today. It says: January 29, 2018 GEORGIA: Total rainfall for the month ranged from 0.5 inches in Butts County to 8.9 inches in Rabun County. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the percentage of the State in a moderate drought increased 15 percentage points…
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The Atlantic posted a series of photos taken this week in Puerto Rico, where 450,000 homes out of 1.5 million are still without power months after Hurricane Marie. Imagine trying to live in conditions like this. Restoration of power and clean-up of all the debris will take years, and that assumes they don’t get hit…
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ABC News has a new video out featuring Ginger Zee discussing the long-term decline in orange production in Florida. In the last year it has been seriously impacted by Hurricane Irma but even before that citrus was declining due to citrus greening and drought. You can read more and watch the video at https://abcnews.go.com/US/floridas-orange-crops-quietly-dying-decade-growers-fight/story?id=52612301. (Personal note–Ginger…
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Eos has an interesting article this week discussing the impact of distant volcanic eruptions on the flow of the Nile River. A new paper in Nature Communications discusses the evidence “indicating that a series of eruptions may have caused sharp drop-offs in the summer rainfall usually brought by the African monsoon.” The cooling from the…
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The latest blog post from Deke Arndt in Climate.gov’s Beyond the Data discusses the state-by-state extremes in weather reported by the National Centers for Environmental Information. These include tidbits like the lowest low temperature, the highest high, the biggest hailstone, the strongest wind, etc. Are all of these records reliable? How do we know? Read the…