Weathering the Storm: The High Cost of Climate Change Facing Our Farmers

What happens in restaurants is intrinsically linked to what happens on farms. When extreme climate events like droughts, floods, or fires impact farmers, chefs see their most beloved ingredients go up in price or become unavailable. As part of our Climate Solutions for Restaurant Survival campaign, which aims to educate and advocate for changes that help restaurants cope with the economic impact of climate change on their operation, we asked Emma Jagoz to share the climate-related challenges that she faces as a farmer in Maryland supplying dozens of restaurants.

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Floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat, extreme cold, and unpredictable weather patterns. Climate change is the biggest threat to our farm and livelihood and farmers need support to survive—so we can feed YOU.  

Here’s a bit of a deeper dive into exactly how climate change is affecting our farm and what we need to do to survive it. Extreme weather patterns increase our need for greenhouse infrastructure to ensure the consistent year-round harvests that restaurants count on. Greenhouses allow us to add shade cloth in extreme heat to keep our plants cool, and to add heat when we experience extreme cold. Greenhouses allow us to better control irrigation and protect from frost and freeze damage. Unpredictable frost dates in the spring and fall greatly increase our risk of crop loss early and late in the seasons, so we need to move many of our plantings inside greenhouses instead of keeping them in the fields. Using greenhouses is effective yet it requires massive upfront costs. Heavy winds, hail, snowstorms, and hurricanes damage our greenhouses, requiring deeper investment. The cost of our one acre of high tunnels is around $250,000, and I estimate we need another two acres in greenhouse infrastructure to ensure high-quality crops in all seasons.

Climate change is warming winters faster. This causes additional pest life cycles, as fewer pests are killed off and they’re able to emerge and reproduce earlier in the year. Warming winters also cause crop diseases to come earlier. Increased pests and diseases lead to greater crop damage if we don’t increase our input use. We estimate that our input costs have risen 50% in the past five years, damaging our already thin margins. To survive, we’ve had to increase our prices across the board.

Thunderstorms and winds cause power outages that affect our cold storage—which ensures food safety—necessitating additional investments in [expensive] back-up generators to prevent massive food loss. Increased hail events cause major tree fruit and field-grown produce losses. Just in 2023, our region’s biggest peach harvest was ruined by hail that rendered all the fruit “seconds'' [(produce whose quality or appearance does not meet the standard of most vendors]) and dramatically decreased its shelf-life and value. Droughts decrease yields of reliable crops like winter squash. In 2022, we lost 30,000 pounds of squash due to drought.

Climate change causes heavier storms with intense rainfall, increasing nutrient run-off and soil erosion, damaging waterways, and [impacting] our bottom lines. Farming organically is a key part of Moon Valley Farm’s climate resilience strategy. Unlike row crop farms, farming organically requires large buffer zones, which help prevent erosion even in big rain events. Prioritizing soil health means cover cropping much of our acreage in lieu of “cash cropping”, helping to smother weeds, restore nutrients, and protect the soil microbiome.  

Farming organically means making investments in beneficial insect planting, and ALL of these investments require the farmers to have extra land, extra labor, extra seed money to execute these strategies. In years when our main crops are destroyed due to climate extremes, we struggle to make ends meet and cannot afford to make these necessary investments without additional support.  

In times of climate change, I believe the biggest challenge will be for farmers like us—diversified organic farmers—to continue to invest in the long-term investments required for long-term soil stewardship. If we are exhausting all of our resources on fixing, repairing, making up for crop losses, and just surviving, we will be unable to make long-term investments in planting trees and cover crops and investing in soil amendments to prioritize healing and health.

Organic farmers like us need support for infrastructure and climate-smart, long-term soil stewardship initiatives so we can help be a SOLUTION to climate change and not just a victim of it. We want to feed our communities through hail and high water—and we can’t do it alone.

To get involved in our Climate Solutions for Restaurant Survival campaign, join us on April 22 at 12:00 P.M. ET for our second Industry Briefing, where you’ll receive toolkits you can use for outreach and updates on campaign activities, including a chef sign-on letter. Register here.

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Emma Jagoz is the owner of Moon Valley Farm in Woodsboro, Maryland. Jagoz is a first-generation farmer and started Moon Valley in 2012. She is passionate about bettering the food system by feeding her community with “responsibly grown and fresh food.” Jagoz also supplies a number of restaurants in the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Norhtern Virginia area, including Oyster Oyster from James Beard Award–winning chef Rob Rubba. 

Dr. Anne McBride is vice president of Programs at the James Beard Foundation.