European Heat Pushes Farmers and Governments Toward Climate-Resilient Crops

Repeated extreme heat across Europe has given new urgency to a question European agriculture has deferred for years, The Japan Times reported. That question is whether the economics of high-intensity farming, designed to feed the largest possible number of people at the lowest cost, still work when heat and drought recur every season. Support is growing for crop varieties and methods that tolerate heat, which typically yield less per hectare in a good year but fail less often in a bad one.

The trade-off is direct. Resilient systems cost more per unit of output and reduce the volatility of that output. European farm policy has spent decades subsidizing the opposite choice.

Conditions elsewhere in the region point the same way. Israel's meteorological service expects temperatures to climb through the week, with heavy heat loads across most areas, unusually hot and dry conditions in the hills and interior on Friday, and humid conditions on the coastal plain before temperatures return to seasonal norms from Saturday.