Friday, March 06, 2015

Climate Consequences for the Western U.S. Farm/Ranch Market

by LANCE OLSEN
 
Over the past several years, I’ve been spending a lot of time studying online real estate ads for farms, ranches, and other rural properties. For a few more years than that, I’ve also been watching the flow of science about climate change impact on aquatic and associated terrestrial systems. While I’ve followed the combination of agricultural land market and climate trends across North America, I’ve been especially interested in the trends for climate science and farm-ranch sales pitches in drier regions such as the interior West’s mountains and plains, where I live.

The interior West is the focus of my following observations. My observations will try for some inclusiveness, but won’t be exhaustive. I’ll describe some plausible differences between what sellers and their agents/brokers disclose of current farm-ranch conditions and the conditions buyers can plausibly expect as rising heat forces change across these and adjacent landscapes.

I’m not about to do anything as serious as give “advice” here, but the short story is that I’m seeing a lot left unsaid about the expected effects of climate change– heat, drought, fire, and flood — on these properties. And what I’m seeing in the science journals suggests that changes of climate will, inevitably and unavoidaly, begin to affect what buyers are willing to pay for them.

I’m not fabricating this scenario of climate forcing change on land and land prices from scratch. It’s a scenario recognized across a variety of sources, including this assessment: “Climate change will alter ecosystem services, perceptions of value, and decisions regarding land uses.” It’s a sentence straight out of the Forest Service’s General Technical Report PNW-GTR-870 December 2012



1 comment:

Dave Skinner said...

Gosh, what a numbskull -- there will be no water, but then it will rain and bust all the dirt dams.
Lance being Lance.