Laura Lengnick is a soil scientist, author, and national leader in sustainable agriculture, known for her work on climate resilience and regenerative food systems. Lengnick has worked for a just transformation of U.S. food and farming for more than 30 years. She served as a lead author of the 2013 USDA report, Climate Change and Agriculture in the United States: Effects and Adaptation, and led the development of the Agriculture Action Plan included in the 2020 North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan. Since 2015, Laura has worked with organizations of all kinds to integrate resilience thinking into operations and strategic planning. The second edition of her award-winning book, Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate (2022), examines climate change, resilience, and the future of food through the adaptation stories of more than 45 award-winning farmers and ranchers growing food throughout the U.S. You can learn more about Laura and her work at cultivatingresilience.com.
RAFI Farmers of Color Network Communications Coordinator Hope Ostane-Baucom spoke with Laura Lengnick about fostering on-farm climate resilience.
Hope Ostane-Baucom (HOB): Can you briefly explain what climate resilience means in the context of agriculture?
Laura Lengnick (LL): Climate resilience means being able to continue to produce and deliver agricultural goods and services despite the disturbances and shocks caused by changing weather patterns and more frequent and intense extreme weather.
HOB: Why is it important for farmers to develop a regenerative climate resilience plan now?
LL: Farmers all over the world are struggling to manage the increasing disruptions to their operations caused by more variable weather patterns and extreme weather events. The kinds of risk management practices used by farmers in the past — for example, depending only on irrigation during a dry period/drought, applying chemicals to control pests and diseases, or purchasing insurance to cover production losses — are growing more expensive and less effective as climate change impacts increase. Today’s farmers need a new way to think about managing the increased weather-related risk — called climate risk — associated with climate change. Regenerative climate resilience planning can help farmers take advantage of this new way of thinking to achieve their business goals as climate risk increases in the coming years.
HOB: What are some of the biggest challenges farmers in the Southeast U.S. face today due to climate change, and how can farmers learn about the specific climate risks in their region?
LL: Farmers in the Southeast say that warmer winters, hotter summers, more dry periods and drought, stronger winds, more extreme weather, reduced water supplies, the earlier arrival of traditional pests and diseases, and the introduction of new pests and diseases have made it harder to manage their operations successfully over the last 20 years. A good way to learn about climate risk specific to the Southeast is to use some of the free online climate risk resources recommended at regenerativefarmresilienceguide.org. For example, the SARE Bulletin, Cultivating Climate Resilience on Farms and Ranches, includes a table of current and expected changes in seasonal weather patterns in the Southeast.
HOB: How can small-scale farmers with limited resources begin to increase the resilience of their operations?
LL: The first step is to make a climate resilience plan. Regenerativefarmresilienceguide.org offers a free DIY “5 Steps” guide for gathering information about climate risks to your farm and identifying the risk management strategies and resilience practices that are a best fit for your operation.
Most farmers can complete a 5 Steps plan in about 25 hours if they follow the DIY 5 Steps Guide. If this is too much time, the next best thing a small-scale farmer can do is use the 5 Steps guide to do two things. First, make a SWOT table to review your farm’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in order to have a clearer picture of your current business position. Second, identify weather-related threats to your farm and review your current climate risk management practices. Then, use any lessons learned through these two steps to improve your standard operation planning.
HOB: Are there any tools or resources you would recommend to help farmers monitor climate impacts on their farms?
LL: Farmers can add a few simple observations to the data that many farmers already use to measure farm performance — like production costs or crop yield and quality — to assess the impact of climate change on their operation. For example, they can get started by trying a few of the whole-farm monitoring practices recommended in the Monitoring Toolbox, like regularly recording temperature, rainfall, or water use in different areas of the farm, keeping track of how stress levels of the people working on the farm change through the growing season, or documenting annual production costs and income for key farm enterprises. Tracking these items can help farmers answer questions like “Is climate risk changing my bottom line? How well am I managing water supplies on my farm? How are weather-related changes affecting the well-being of me and my employees?”
HOB: What makes a resilience plan effective and adaptable to unexpected changes?
LL: The key difference between a more traditional farm management/operations plan and a farm resilience plan is the use of practices that support farmer observation of farm system performance over time. These practices — such as regular observation of water use, worker stress levels, or profitability of each farm enterprise — help the farmer learn how the farm as a whole responds to changing conditions — both those that are expected and those that are not.
HOB: How does collaboration with other farmers or community stakeholders fit into these steps?
LL: Regenerative climate resilience planning invites farmers to think about cultivating healthy social relationships — with farming and non-farming neighbors, customers, suppliers, and technical assistance specialists, for example — to reduce climate risk to their operations. Participation in social networks is proven to promote on-farm innovations that enhance farm resilience — for example, the learning supported by participation in community-based research and education. In addition, social networks are widely recognized as critical to swift and low-cost disaster recovery. This recognition of healthy social networks as a climate risk management strategy is one important difference between regenerative resilience planning and current risk management practices recommended by the USDA, which tend to put more focus on financial and technological climate risk management practices — for example, purchasing production insurance, adding drainage, or upgrading to more efficient irrigation.
HOB: Could you share a story about a farmer who inspired you with their innovative approach to climate resilience?
LL: It is difficult to choose just one example. Every farmer that I’ve worked with since I started exploring the idea of resilience has inspired me with their knowledge, creativity, and commitment to caring for their land while producing healthy food for their community. They have invited me to broaden my own thinking about what it means to cultivate resilience in a particular place, at a particular time, and on a particular farm. Some farmers that come to mind have fine-tuned practical strategies to cultivate resilience in their own operations. For example, Tom Trantham’s “12 Aprils” pasture-cropping system on his dairy farm in SC. Bernard Obie’s attention to cultivating a spiritual partnership with the plants that he tends on his diversified vegetable and fruit farm in NC. Ira Wallace and Mary Berry’s shift to no-till soil practices and the addition of earthworks on their vegetable seed farm in VA. Jim Crawford’s use of plastic mulch to protect his field soils from heavy rains between soil prep and planting on his diversified vegetable farm in PA. Jim and Adele Hayes’ use of “practice stacking” on their multi-species livestock farm in NY.
HOB: How have farmers used traditional or Indigenous knowledge in their resilience efforts?
LL: All of today’s farmers grow food using practices rooted in Indigenous knowledge, whether they recognize this or not. Many common so-called sustainable, organic, or regenerative agricultural principles and practices used by farmers in the U.S. have been carefully crafted through millennia by Indigenous people growing food for their communities around the world. Diversified farmers throughout the U.S. say that they depend on a small set of modern practices with strong Indigenous roots to cultivate climate resilience, including practices that promote soil health and increase biodiversity on farms, such as crop rotation, cover crops, reduced tillage, the use of fire and grazing animals as management tools, and the integration of animals and perennial crops into annual cropping systems. Some farmers also recognize the value of these practices to cultivate healthy relationships of mutual benefit and reciprocity, respect, and appreciation for the land, people, and communities that sustain their farm over the long term.
HOB: What role do policies or community programs play in supporting farmers’ climate resilience efforts?
LL: Over the last decade, changes in federal and state agricultural policy, along with new public and private sector funding, have been an important source of technical and financial assistance to farmers working to adapt to climate change and cultivate the climate resilience of their operations. Many of these new policies and programs also created new opportunities for farmers considered “historically underserved” by the USDA — including beginning, socially disadvantaged, veteran, and limited-resource farmers. Such initiatives include federal and state programs like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, NRCS Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry Activities, Soil and Water Conservation Districts, and nonprofit projects like the American Farmland Trust’s Women for the Land Resilience Learning Circles and RAFI’s Climate and Equity Policy Project and Resources for Resilient Farms project.
On January 27, the USDA froze all grant and loan programs. Since then, we have witnessed a confusion of executive orders, departmental directives, lawsuits, and court decisions as the new Trump administration works to permanently end all federal funding for programs designed to support historically underserved farmers and agricultural adaptation to climate change. I don’t know where federally funded agricultural assistance programs will land when the dust settles on these early days of the Trump administration. What I do know is that climate risk is expected to grow more damaging in the years ahead. If we want U.S. agriculture to continue to produce the agricultural goods and services so fundamental to our well-being, we must be willing to help all of our farmers and ranchers adapt to the unprecedented challenges ahead by supporting community-based technical and financial assistance programs.
Crafting Your Climate Resilience Plan
When creating a climate resilience plan, it can be difficult to decide where to start. According to Lengnick, the USDA recommends prioritizing actions in the following order:
Use adaptive management: This involves making decisions based on ongoing observations and experiences, allowing farmers to refine their practices in real time as conditions and challenges change. For example, farmers and ranchers use regular on-farm observations of rainfall, soil moisture, and plant growth through the growing season to guide their use of practices like intensive grazing or dynamic crop rotation.
Reduce near-term risk to critical assets: Prioritize actions that address the most immediate threats to key resources or operations, such as protecting against droughts that can cause total crop failure.
Reduce risk to most vulnerable assets: Focus on safeguarding resources or systems most at risk of damage, such as protecting the soil from erosion or preventing loss of crops during extreme weather events.
Choose options most likely to be effective: Select proven strategies with a high likelihood of success, especially when addressing critical risks, to ensure the chosen actions achieve their intended goals without unnecessary risks. For example, if you want to improve soil health to reduce vulnerability to drought, choose soil health practices that have proven successful for other farmers in your area rather than a practice that has rarely or never proven successful.
Choose “no regrets” options: Adopt practices that offer benefits regardless of climate conditions, such as cultivating soil health, which improves resilience and profitability even in years with favorable weather.
Choose options with mitigation co-benefits: Implement strategies that not only reduce climate risks but also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions or providing other environmental benefits, such as using cover crops and crop diversity.
Hope Ostane-Baucom joined RAFI as the Farmers of Color Network Communications Coordinator in July 2024. Hope is passionate about local food systems and integrated pest management. She volunteers at farmer’s markets, tends her garden, and performs spoken word poetry.