Oswald's family has farmed near the Missouri river for 80 years. This year was the the first time his farm house flooded. | M. Scott Mahaskey
Oswald’s parents built the tidy farmhouse in “the river bottom,” as locals call it, in 1939, about four miles off the Missouri River. When the foundation went in, his dad asked the builder to add an extra layer of cement blocks to give the house a leg up against any flooding that might come their way.
For much of the past century, Oswald’s family and farmers in the area lived in relative peace with the Missouri River. That started to change dramatically in 1993, when both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers flooded and sunk more than 300,000 square miles of the heartland under water — a catastrophe that killed dozens of people and caused $15 billion in damages.
Even then, the flood water didn’t breach the ground floor of Oswald’s farm house. In the years since, there have been numerous scares, when intense rains or snow melts have filled the river to its capacity, causing Oswald and his neighbors to be “on edge” year after year, he said.
The last time Oswald’s land flooded, in 2011, was a turning point for him.
“Before that I was saying, yes the climate is changing, but I wasn’t ready to say that the change was caused by human activity,” he said. As he looked at the science on rising temperatures and increasing greenhouse gas emissions, he said he became convinced of the connection.
Back in 2011, a bout of extreme rains left upstream reservoirs so overloaded with water that the Army Corps of Engineers had no choice but to stage a controlled flood.
Farmers in Oswald’s area were given three weeks’ notice before the flood water was let loose. Equipment could be taken to higher ground, corn and beans moved out. Oswald’s house was spared.
What happened this year was a “perfect storm” in many ways, he said. It had already been one of the wettest years on record in much of the Missouri River watershed when a huge storm — dubbed a “bomb cyclone” — pummeled the central U.S. in mid-March, dropping massive rain and snow from North Dakota to Colorado. In many places, the ground was too frozen to handle the influx of water, leading to widespread runoff.
Several communities saw the Missouri River and its tributaries rise to levels they had simply never seen before.
In northeastern Nebraska, one tributary became so overloaded with water and massive chunks of floating ice that it burst through the Spencer Dam “unleashing a wave of water” into the already fast-rising Missouri River, as the federal government would later describe it.
“Dams aren’t supposed to collapse,” Oswald said. “But they’re also supposed to be managed so that they don’t collapse. When you have as much rain and snow as we had, then man has to take that into account. If they don't, why, this is the kind of thing we get. This ignorant denial of the fact that, yeah, the climate has changed and things are different now, is just going to lead to more of this.”
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Against the backdrop of a devastating year, the climate hubs, USDA’s front line to help farmers, are not just flying under the radar — they are also struggling to hold on to what little funding and staff they have.
The inaugural class of fellows, many of them post-docs, who helped launch the climate hubs has begun to move on and those workers, who make up nearly a third of the total staff, are not expected to be replaced. USDA said no decisions have been made about whether the fellows program will continue.
“It’s duct-taped together,” said one current climate hub employee who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.
The haphazard budget set-up, where agencies are expected to chip in, has only gotten more precarious as the hubs go further into an administration that seems largely indifferent to them. As another official explained it: “It was set up to be preserved because it doesn’t have a line item, but it was also kind of set up to fail because it doesn’t have a line item.”
In recent years, two of the USDA agencies that had been supplying funds for the hub network have pulled their financial support: the Risk Management Agency and Farm Service Agency, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. Despite these challenges, USDA said the department has managed to keep the overall budget for the climate hubs largely flat — at nearly $11 million total for all ten locations — since 2015.
Nonetheless, other agencies have started to ask that the staff they’re dedicating to the hubs do more work that’s specific to the mission of their agency, not necessarily the broader mission of the climate hubs.
The Forest Service, for example, is less interested in changing on-farm practices because it’s outside the scope of its work, and the Agricultural Research Service is generally more interested in publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals than it is in doing farmer outreach, something that’s usually left to other parts of USDA.
The rocky political situation has left the hubs to struggle with competing priorities and an uncertain future while international authorities warn that action on climate is increasingly urgent to stave off the most dire consequences.
Officials who work on climate issues within USDA are often conflicted about whether the hubs and their resources should get more promotion in the current administration, according to more than a dozen interviews with current and former staff. On one hand, they see their work as more urgent than ever, but on the other there’s a sense that ignoring the hubs may be key to their survival in a politically hostile environment.
“The one saving grace is that they’re so low-profile they haven’t been targeted,” one former hub official said.
Against the odds, the boot-strapped climate hubs have come up with several programs and tools aimed specifically at helping farmers, ranchers and forest managers make climate-focused decisions, according to interviews and a review of their websites. And the hubs continue to use the term climate change liberally — a rarity in the department.
Last year, the Northwest Climate Hub, fresh off a particularly horrible wildfire season, contributed to a new tool called AgBizClimate built by Oregon State University. The program allows operators to plug in farm-specific information and model out economic costs and returns for their businesses under different climate scenarios.
“This tool is a powerful means to summarize and help farmers understand their area’s available climate information,” according to a page on the Northwest Climate Hub’s website. “More importantly, it shows how climate change could impact the costs and returns they are likely to face over the next twenty to thirty years.”
Earlier this year, the Northern Plains Climate Hub teamed up with the University of Nebraska Lincoln to launch a new simulation tool to help farmers make farm-practice decisions based on extreme weather scenarios — something that rolled out just months after record flooding of the Missouri River and its tributaries left countless fields either under water or too wet to plant.
The Southwest Climate Hub, which serves an area where rising temperatures are expected to hamper growing leafy greens and other sensitive specialty crops, in 2017 launched a data portal called AgRisk Viewer, which allows farmers and local officials to analyze trends in crop insurance payouts by state or county, providing an overview of what type of weather is driving losses in certain areas.
Such systems could be useful to farmers whose operations are increasingly high tech and data-driven. But most of the digital tools are so buried on USDA’s network of websites that producers would likely need to know what they were looking for to find them.
One exception has been an initiative developed by the Northern Great Plains Climate Hub called Grass-Cast, which forecasts how much grass will be available for livestock in the upcoming summer. Last summer, USDA’s blog touted the newly launched tool, which uses more than three decades of data to make predictions.
The decision to highlight the work of the Northern Great Plains Climate Hub shows that when USDA wants to embrace a tool, it has the capacity to do so. In most cases, it doesn’t. That consigns important information that could help millions of farmers to the back reaches of the extensive web of USDA websites or the largely unseen Twitter feed of the climate hubs.
In late August, for example, the hubs account posted a report confirming that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year since the mid-1800s, while greenhouse gases and sea levels were also at record levels. The tweet got a meager one like and one retweet.
