Giving Compass' Take:

• Mark Schapiro explains how farmers in California are working to design the future of agriculture through climate change-resistant practices for trees. 

• How can funders support efforts to innovate agriculture in preparation for climate change?

• Learn more about climate change and agriculture. 

Duarte, one of the largest commercial nurseries in the world, specializes in tree nuts and fruits, which have boomed across the valley in recent decades. Founded four decades ago, the nursery grew rapidly as water piped into the valley from the Sierras gave birth to the most bounteous center for agriculture in North America. The nursery now sprawls over 200 acres in the town of Hughson, just outside Modesto. Things began to change about a decade ago, according to John Duarte, the nursery's president.

When I first met Duarte back in 2012, he resisted calling the shifts he was seeing climate change: "Whether it's carbon built up in the atmosphere or just friggin' bad luck," he said then, "the conditions are straining us." Today, he still avoids the climate change label. ("You should meet my daughter; I think she agrees with you on the climate business," he told me recently.) But even seven years ago, Duarte was on the forefront of researching tree varieties suited to a hotter, drier, saltier future.

Trees present a particular challenge: Conditions shift, but the trees can't move. A fruit or nut tree planted today may, depending on the species, be ill-suited to climatic conditions by the time it begins bearing fruit in five or 10 years. So the question Duarte is trying to answer, the one bedeviling farmers across the valley, is, what to plant today that can thrive and bear fruit over the next quarter century or more?

"Everyone," Duarte said, "is thinking about the impacts of warm winters and not enough water." Valley temperatures are predicted to rise between 3.5 and six degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, while periods of extreme heat are expected to lengthen. Even now, it's often not cold enough in winter to permit trees' metabolism to slow down, a process critical to the spring flowering that produces fruits and nuts later in the season. Irrigation water is becoming saltier too. Desperate farmers drilling ever-deeper wells are pumping up saltier water. And a new state law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, will likely serve as a catalyst of change. Starting in 2020, it will regulate how much water farmers can withdraw from the Central Valley aquifer. The law promises to shake up the methods and business of valley agriculture.

The lessons learned here, or not learned, have implications for agricultural regions elsewhere, from the American Midwest to North Africa, southern Europe, and southwest China. These breadbaskets are already experiencing similar extremes of heat, drought, and flood, and new pests and diseases.

Read the full article about designing the future of agriculture by Mark Schapiro at Pacific Standard.