In 1901, when Eric Odberg’s great-great-grandfather settled in Genesee, Idaho, he could look out his window and find rolling hills saturated with rich soil as far as his eye could see.
The Palouse was only sparsely populated then, dotted with small, budding family farms.
Now, when Odberg looks out the window of his Genesee home, he sees those same rolling hills, abundant with wheat fields and science.
Since taking over the family farm in 1993, Odberg said he has had to shift his farming practices and integrate new technologies to accommodate the changing landscape and climate of the Palouse.
“I learned from my father, he learned from his and so on,” Odberg said.
Odberg Farms Inc. now belongs to a distinguished set of Century Farms — farms owned by a single family for more than 100 years.
To ensure the winter wheat and legume-producing farm thrives for another 100 years, and for his three children, Odberg looked to UI, specifically UI’s Regional Approaches to Climate Change project (REACCH).
The Pacific Northwest is one of the most vital, yet threatened farming regions in the U.S. due to climate change, according to the American Farmland Trust.
While more climate change research is being conducted on the Western side of the Pacific Northwest, the REACCH project aimed to bring similar research inland.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) put out a call for universities across the country to research agriculture and climate change. Students and faculty at UI were among the first to answer that call.
As a result, the REACCH project was developed by 2011, and received $20 million in grants from the USDA. In collaboration with Oregon State University, Washington State University and the USDA Agricultural Research Service, the UI-led project hosted a robust team of nearly 78 scientists, staff and students.
Sanford Eigenbrode
Sanford Eigenbrode, REACCH project director and UI professor, said the USDA encouraged interdisciplinary-based projects and prompted three topics involving agriculture and climate change: corn production, tree growth and wheat harvests.
“We went all in on the wheat — obviously,” Eigenbrode said.
The grant money was divided between the four institutions and paid for the work of 30 scientific investigators to begin the research. With a robust and lengthy list of project candidates in the areas of agricultural economics, soil sciences, entomology and marketing, the project quickly became more integrated than Eigenbrode ever imagined, he said.
REACCH relied strongly on farms throughout the Pacific Northwest, like Odberg Farms Inc., what researchers called case studies.
“The reason this was all so successful was because of the diversity of knowledge in our team,” Eigenbrode said. “That’s what put us over the top.”
The research, he said, is the culmination of nearly seven years of teamwork.
Even with a long-running program, John Abatzoglou, a UI associate professor of climatology and a REACCH scientist, said it can be difficult to pique interest in climate change when the issue is not entirely visible.
“We have seen warming temperatures warm 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century,” Abatzoglou said. “It doesn’t seem like much, but to a farmer it makes a world of a difference.”
John Abatzoglou
Abatzoglou noticed a longer, warmer growing season for several years now. Although that may seem like a positive predicament for farmers, he said the long-term effects of this continued warming could have major consequences for the Palouse.
To more thoroughly investigate those possible consequences, a large portion of the REACCH project provided outreach programing to current and future farmers, Eigenbrode said.
Longtime family-owned farms, like Odberg Farms, were often the lab sites of the program — a part of the research that quickly became soil scientist Jodi Johnson-Maynard’s favorite aspect of the project.
Maynard said even though scientists and some Palouse farmers do not always see eye-to-eye on the specifics of climate change, the end result is always the same — finding long-term sustainability.
“These farmers need the science,” Eigenbrode said. “But sometimes, they are fearful certain policies will be made that require them to do certain things on their farm — that’s never an easy sell.”
While researchers most often look at climate change in 50-year increments, Abatzoglou said many farmers look to the future as well, but only in about two-year spans.
The culture of Palouse farmers willing to acknowledge their part in mitigating and adapting to climate change, Eigenbrode said, differs from other parts of the country.
“It’s a conservative and historical area,” Eigenbrode said. “No one wants to mess with that.”
Abatzoglou said assessing the future damage of climate change is never easy, and the decisions farmers must make in the face of climate change are even more difficult.
“With climate change, we can do three things: We can do nothing, or we can mitigate the effects and we can learn to adapt,” Abatzoglou said.
Odberg took to mitigation and adaptation. Welcoming the research, he said scientists planted monitoring stations on 12 acres of his farm and analyzed data from the soil to the seeding technique over a five-year period.
The project aided Odberg in “weatherproofing” his farm, helping to build soil that could survive extreme weather events.
“These extremes are going to continue,” Odberg said. “This is the new normal for the Palouse.”
Farmers, Maynard said, know their own farming systems and the climate intimately. But that can be difficult with rapidly changing weather patterns.
“We have a lot of common ground, so we look at that common ground,” Maynard said. “We know where our interests and concerns overlap, and that’s when we run with it.”
The idea of climate change can vary from farmer to scientist, Maynard said, but both farmers and scientists look to produce the most competitive, sustainable farming processes.
With the REACCH project’s recent February end date, Eigenbrode and his team looks to tie up loose ends, even though “the research could go on forever,” he said.
Jodie Johnson-Maynard
The USDA originally commissioned the university for a five-year project period, but it was extended when a large portion of the $20 million was left unused.
“These programs are expensive and hard to get just right, but we are getting close,” Eigenbrode said.
Although the REACCH program ended in February, Eigenbrode said the research will live on through the Landscapes in Transition project.
Headed by Maynard, the project received $3.5 million in funding from the USDA and will act as an extension of the REACCH program.
However, the interdisciplinary team members on the Landscapes in Transition project, Maynard said, still have many unanswered questions to ask over the next four years.
“The new project really set out a firm foundation from the REACCH project — we found a lot of good data and have a good understanding of where to move onto now,” Maynard said.
The distribution of extremely wet soil will be the priority of farmers and scientists for the duration of the Landscapes in Transition project. Scientists on the project will focus on finding sustainable solutions for utilizing the wet soil from year-to-year.
“We need to really start thinking about how we manage our agricultural systems, so we are going with a very holistic approach on this project,” Maynard said. “We will know what works best for everyone when that solution is environmentally and economically sustainable.”