Climate and Crops Ibook – a Resource to Help Southeast Farming Adapting to a Variable Climate

The diversity and differences that make the agricultural production in the Southeast unique also challenge farmers to produce crops with limited resources. Farmers must cope with frequent droughts, uncertainty on irrigation water availability, several crop pests and diseases, degraded soils with low organic matter and water holding capacity. These farming threats are exacerbated by climate variability influenced by ENSO and climate change.  An iBook has been developed to help farmers and crop consultants adapt Southeast farming to a variable climate. Information was collected during face-to-face meetings scheduled with almost 30 extension specialists from the main land grand universities in the Southeast US. The iBook, focused on the five main row crops growing in the Southeast – cotton, corn, soybean, peanut, wheat; is a compendium of the risks potential climate scenarios can impose on growing crops. Each chapter includes basic production considerations. Moreover, each of these chapters include sections dealing with potential climatic conditions that might occur during a crop growing season and how these affect each crop in terms of planting, crop growth and development, insects, weeds, disease pressure, and, harvest.   Along with the risks, adaptation strategies to cope with each of these climate scenarios are listed. The iBook offers multiple interactive options, including videos, interactive maps, graphs, and hundreds of images related to problematic insects, diseases and weeds. Although the biology of a crop, insects and diseases is the result of an endless combination of driving factors, the most common climate related risks are included in this iBook. The “Climate and Crops” iBook can be downloaded free from iBooks.