Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Geography

First Advisor

Jonathan Winter

Second Advisor

Susanne Freidberg

Abstract

As climate change brings increased temperatures and precipitation variability to New England, it is imperative to understand the ways that farmers make decisions about agricultural climate change adaptation for their corn farms. Dairy farming is the largest agricultural industry in New England, with corn being a primary crop to feed these cattle. This project seeks to understand how climate modeling and crop modeling are and are not useful for these corn farm decisions, and contributes research about what types of information are useful and available to farmers making adaptation decisions. Crop modeling over New England reveals that corn farming in southern parts of the region will benefit most from climate change adaptation as they experience warmer temperatures. However, interviews show that neither farmers nor agricultural advisors use modeling outputs often, if at all, in field-level decisions partially due to their spatial and temporal scale and inaccurate representations of adaptations. Additionally, we found that farmers currently make adaptation decisions primarily motivated by increasing soil health, reducing costs, and incentive programs, rather than global climate change mitigation or adaptation. Future modeling efforts should seek to incorporate farmer knowledge and adaptation strategies into future scenarios and produce smaller scale outputs so that models could become a tool for making future agricultural climate change adaptation decisions.

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