White House announces pact to help ag battle climate

The White House announced a partnership Tuesday with Monsanto, Walmart and other companies to better use data to make agriculture and the country's food system more resilient in responding to the growing impact of climate change.

The initiative, part of the Obama administration's push to increase public backing for its climate change agenda, would connect farmers, food distributors and agricultural businesses with data, tools, and information to understand how climate change is impacting their operations while identifying steps they can take to prepare for it.

"These steps are a direct response to the president's call for all hands on deck to generate further innovation to help prepare America's communities and business for the impacts of climate change," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and John Holdren, the president's science adviser, said in a blog posted by the White House.

The corporations contributing to the effort announced Tuesday by the White House include Monsanto, Microsoft, PepsiCo, IBM and Amazon. Monsanto said it will donate a maize breeding trial dataset to help public- and private-sector scientists better understand how climate and water-availability changes will impact crop productivity and food security.

And PepsiCo pledged to install solar panels at a Gatorade plant in Arizona that would prevent the release of about 50,000 tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases over 25 years.

The Obama administration also will host a series of workshops in Washington, D.C., starting Wednesday on data, food resilience, climate change and food emergencies.

The climate change announcement comes the same day as the Obama administration warned that failing to fully reduce the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change could cost the U.S. economy $150 billion a year through lost agricultural production, flooding and other disasters like hurricanes.

The USDA and the White House have been active in highlighting the impact climate change is having on agriculture where farmers have faced more intense heat waves, severe droughts, floods and other disasters. USDA said in April grants totaling $6 million were given to 10 universities, including Iowa State, to study the effects of climate on agriculture production.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced the creation of seven regional climate hubs that will help farmers, ranchers and rural communities adapt to extreme weather. One of the stations will be located at the USDA's National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames.

Already, warmer weather has led to a longer growing season. That has shifted where some crops are grown, while leaving fields more susceptible to pests that are able to survive the winter. In the Midwest and Great Plains, where much of the country's corn, wheat and soybeans are produced, the growing season has been extended by almost two weeks during the last 60 years.