Climate change has been called the new normal. But after the past two years, residents in some parts of the Southwest say there’s nothing normal about it. Communities in the Four Corners – where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona meet – have been bouncing between desperate dryness and record-breaking moisture since the winter of 2017, forcing people dependent on the reliability and predictability of water to adapt. On a recent warm, sunny day, rancher Dustin Stein pushed down the wires of an electric fence with his left foot while he swung his other leg over into an irrigated pasture. His black and brown steers grazed on the late summer grass. The mustachioed 30-something has managed Stubborn Farms and Burk Beef outside Mancos, a small town in southwestern Colorado, for seven years. “We’re a ‘sperm to steak’ grass-fed beef operation,” Stein said with a laugh. Calves born on the ranch are raised here, and their meat sold directly to consumers. His focus is on the health of the soil and the needs of his cows.
If you want a sense of what climate change is doing to agriculture in the Southwest, and how individuals are reacting to unprecedented weather, this is a good place to see those effects on a small scale. “We’ve set records almost every year, good or bad,” Stein said. “So hot, so dry. So much snow, the river’s too high. It’s just incredibly bipolar.” In parts of the Four Corners, the winter of 2017-18 was one of the driest ever recorded, kicking off the latest intensification of a prolonged dry period that’s stretched two decades. Rivers ran at some of their lowest flows ever recorded during spring runoff in 2018. The summer of 2018 was the hottest on record across most of the Colorado Plateau. From October 2017 to September 2018, the region experienced the driest weather in more than a century of recordkeeping. To view the full article visit Cronkite News.