The Orange Groves of Saskatoon

By Jock O’Connell

This column is about climate change, agriculture, and West Coast seaports, but it starts at around 40,000 feet above sea level on a flight from Copenhagen to San Francisco earlier this month. As one does on eleven-hour flights, I tend to glance periodically at the flight monitor to check our location. And so it was that about eight hours into the flight I noticed we were flying over Saskatoon, the largest metropolis in the sparsely populated Canadian Province of Saskatchewan.

Realizing we were so close to Saskatchewan caused me to chuckle as I began wondering how the citrus orchards down there were faring as another winter freeze descended on a land that is north of North Dakota but contains more than 40% of Canada’s cultivated farmland.

Citrus on the prairie? What are you talking about, O’Connell?

Well, you see, some seven or eight years ago, I got a phone call from a gentleman who asked if I could possibly be so kind to put him in touch with executives in California’s fruit processing industry. Yes, I replied, but first who are you? Turns out he was one of those excessively polite Canadians who in this case worked for Saskatchewan’s agricultural ministry.

“We’ve been studying some remarkable projections about global warming [as climate change was known back then] and we think we may have to change our cropping patterns within a few decades.”

You’re not the only ones, I thought. Worrying about climate change was then fast emerging as a growth industry.

But talk about advance planning. Saskatchewan is a place that puts the winter into winter wheat and now they’re thinking citrus. So, after arriving home from SFO, I checked to see whether their cropping patterns up north of the border had begun to shift.

Well, according to the province’s agricultural statistics, it’s not yet growing oranges or lemons or limes, at least in any commercial quantities. Nor are there any traces of cherries or grapes or even tree nuts. With warming temperatures, the local growing season there may be getting a shade longer, but Saskatchewan farming is still mostly about wheat, canola, barley, dairy products, and pulse crops like lentils and chickpeas.

Growers of specialty crops in California, Oregon, and Washington need not fret about competition from Saskatchewan…at least not yet.

To be sure, Canadian climate scientists are continuing to predict warmer winters, longer growing seasons, and beneficially higher yields for the province’s farmers. But, for reasons evident in the North American Drought Monitor shown here, they are also concerned about water supplies.

According to an article I managed to track down in Saskatoon’s local newspaper, a warmer climate without adequate moisture in the soil can involve a nasty tradeoff: “Moisture is a transformative element driving the physics, chemistry and biology of healthy soil. Water brings life. Without it, you’re looking at a pile of lifeless, and increasingly useless, dirt.”

Which gets us back to our side of the 49th parallel, where much of the West is enduring drought conditions ranging from merely Severe to downright Exceptional. Among the areas most affected are the major agricultural regions of central Washington and Oregon along with almost the entire state of California.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks states according to the productive prowess of their growers and ranchers based on their total farm receipts. Collectively, in 2020, U.S. farms took in $357.16 billion. Washington State’s $9.89 billion in farm receipts put it in eleventh place nationally, just behind North Carolina but ahead of Missouri. With $5.06 billion in farm receipts, Oregon ranked 26th between Kentucky and Mississippi. Now here’s something that always surprises a few folks, but America’s leading agricultural state is not Iowa or Kansas or Nebraska or any of the other amber waves of grain states in the nation’s midsection. It is California, whose $49.08 billion in farm receipts last year was roughly double second-place Iowa’s $25.70 billion.

The problem is that much of that revenue is earned by growers in drought-ridden regions in the West, and nowhere is this more evident than in California’s vast Central Valley, whose default condition is basically that of an arid desert. That, of course, was long before an intricate network of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping stations brought water to the valley’s farms and turned the region into the most valuable piece of agricultural real estate on the planet. Unfortunately, most of that infrastructure for capturing and distributing water dates back to the middle of the 20th century, when California’s population was less than half what it is now and when climate conditions were far less frenetic.

Dwindling water resources are not the sole problem challenging farms, orchards, and dairies in the western states. The Central Valley’s population is California’s fastest growing. Between now and mid-century, Fresno County’s population is expected to grow by 20.0%, to 1,226,158 from 1,021,649. Kern County should grow in population by 31.1% to 1,207,086 from 920,651. The number of residents in San Joaquin County should increase by 24.9% to 968,662 from 775,350, while neighboring Stanislaus County is anticipated to have 18.9% more residents (668,224) by mid-century. Having more residents not only implies more demand for water but a greater need for housing in a state that still feels uncomfortable about density. And because those who value land by the acre are at a distinct disadvantage vis a vis those who price it at the square-foot, Central Valley growers have every reason to fear their neighbors.

Still, as UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain has observed, it’s the extreme variability in weather that poses the greater immediate danger to agriculture. “We are seeing the driest of dries, the wettest of wets, and the hottest of hots,” he told a Public Policy Institute of California video conference on November 15. As if Mother Nature wanted to underscore his point, just three weeks earlier parts of drought-stricken Northern California received the most rainfall ever recorded in a single day, enough to prompt the National Weather Service to issue flood warnings.

The unprecedented variability in climate also shreds longstanding water management policies. For example, California Department of Water Resources chief Karla Nemeth concedes that her agency’s forecasting models for managing the state’s water supply have been upended by climate change. Not only was last winter’s snow fall in the Sierras less than forecast, the portion of the snowpack that eventually finds its way into the state’s reservoirs was much less than predicted. In more normal times, her department estimates that 60% of the spring and summer runoff will wind up in reservoirs. But this year, that “runoff efficiency rate” was nearer to 20%. More of the runoff had seeped into depleted aquifers or had simply evaporated due to higher-than-normal temperatures in the spring.

Circumstances are no longer normal.

So what does this have to do with the ports? Well, consider that California’s most lucrative non-dairy farm product is the almond, over two-thirds of which are exported. And, since only about five percent of all almond exports go to Canada and Mexico, the rest are typically shipped abroad in oceanborne containers. Similarly, a third of Washington State’s apple crop is normally exported each year as are a quarter of its cherry harvest and up to 90% of its wheat. Just over 40% of Oregon’s farm produce likewise go to foreign markets.

To get a firmer understanding of what agriculture in the Pacific Coast states means for West Coast ports, let’s look at the one agricultural export that is largely grown in the West – Edible Fruits and Nuts or EF&N, for short.

Last year, $9.32 billion in EF&N exports left U.S. ports for foreign markets. $8.20 billion (88.0%) of these shipments were containerized. In tonnage terms, 90.9% of 2020 maritime exports of EF&N traveled in containers.

The top six ports handling U.S. exports of EF&N are not unexpectedly all on the U.S. West Coast. Leading the way was the Port of Oakland, which alone has accounted for 56.9% of all EF&N export tonnage from U.S. ports in the first three quarters of 2021. The Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined to handle 24.6% of the trade, followed by the Northwest Seaport Alliance Ports of Tacoma and Seattle with a 10.7% share. Next – and ahead of both Houston and Savannah – was the Port of Hueneme with a 1.7% share of the trade.

As Exhibit A reveals, exports of EF&N have been a much bigger business at the Port of Oakland. EF&N exports from the Port of Oakland last year amounted to 1,484,827 metric tons with a value of $5.73 billion.

More critically, while containerized exports of EF&N represented just 2.3% of all containerized export tonnage at the two Southern California ports last year, and 7.7% of all containerized export tonnage from the two Northwest Seaport Alliance ports, they did account for 15.9% of Oakland’s containerized export tonnage in 2020. And where containerized exports of EF&N through the first three quarters of this year were up 2.3% over the same period last year at Los Angeles/Long Beach and down 24.9% at the NWSA ports, the year-over-year increase at Oakland was a robust 11.5%.

The Port of Oakland’s advantage as a gateway for farm exports stems principally from its proximity to an arc of hyper-productive agricultural enterprises that begins in the wine-soaked Counties of Sonoma and Napa before spilling over into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys before curving back to encompass the Monterey Bay area.

But nature seems bent on threatening that advantage by unleashing a persistent pattern of droughts that have soaked up precious groundwater, higher temperatures that have abused unpicked produce, wildfires that blot out sunlight and taint unharvested fruit, and weather as erratic and unreliable as my uncle Victor’s ’59 Chevy Impala. The port’s export business certainly appears to be the most vulnerable of all the major USWC ports to having West Coast agriculture disrupted by climate change.

For now, though, I hope you all enjoyed a fine celebration of Thanksgiving last Thursday, content in the knowledge that the fresh fruits and nuts you consumed still largely come from this side of the border and not – at least yet – from the fabled groves of Saskatoon.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.