Food & Climate
The San Juan Islands in northwest Washington State become a more attractive refuge from climate extremes which will represent more pressure for food system that facing climate change.
Roughly 160 kilometers northwest of Seattle, the San Juan Islands are made up of more than 172 named islands and reefs.
The most frequently visited islands are the four with ferry service: Lopez, Orcas, San Juan and Shaw. One of world’s best whale-watching destinations.
“We’re a very long way from producing all of our own food. Right now, only around 3.5 to 4% of the food that’s purchased in San Juan County is grown here,” explains Faith Van De Putte from Midnight’s Farm who also serves as the county’s Agricultural Resource Committee Coordinator, according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
In the San Juan Islands, food resiliency is a vital part of community member’s livelihoods and it is more important than ever in the face of climate change. The changing climate creates new obstacles for agriculture in the islands.
Climate change
Farmers are facing wetter springs that delay planting and disrupt pollination, followed by hotter, drier summers that bring drought and the risk of total crop failures.
Van De Putte recalls the devastating heat dome from three years ago which led to multiple farms losing their entire crops: “Those kinds of events can have a very big impact. Anytime we go outside our normal bounds, there’s going to be effects.”
Nathan Hodges of Barn Owl Bakery concurs: “It’s really difficult to predict overall changes in weather patterns due to climate change.” Nathan Hodges and Sage Dilts grow some of their own grain for the bakery and share that to mitigate this unpredictability, they focus on building diversity within their grain seed bank. “Rather than relying on one very productive monocrop that is genetically identical across all the individuals, we rely on thousands of genetically distinct individual plants and seeds, so that in any given year, there’s always going to be some plant that will do well,” Hodges explains.
In the face of these unpredictable and increasingly severe conditions, the need for a resilient food system has never been more critical.
Van De Putte shares, “When I think about resiliency, I think about redundancy in systems.” Applying this to the food system in the islands, she identifies “having home gardens that are producing food, having a vibrant local agricultural community that’s producing food at a variety of scales, having the infrastructure that’s needed to process and store the food that’s grown here and distribute it, and then having the connections to the mainland and the ability to import food in different ways, through different channels.”
Fragile food system
As the San Juan Islands become a more attractive refuge from climate extremes, the local food system will face increasing pressure. “We’ll see more people move here and have more of the climate refugees situation,” Sage Dilts from Barn Owl Bakery predicts. This rising population could strain an already fragile food system, which, as Dilts points out, “is not really prepared for large-scale demand”, according to “The Rcasonian”.
The high cost of land and labor further complicates the situation for farmers in the islands. Van De Putte explains, “Land access for new and beginning farmers is a huge challenge and is going to continue to be. When the value of the land is completely divorced from the productive value of the land, you can’t pay off land by farming it.”
To strengthen the resiliency of San Juan County’s food system, a multifaceted approach is needed—one that combines financial support, community education, and policy changes to support sustainable agriculture. Supporting existing programs that are crucial to the community’s food system is also essential. Hodges underscores the collaborative spirit that defines the
county’s approach to food resiliency. “There are a lot of individuals, institutions, nonprofits, and government entities that have a lot of passion and interest and desire to build a very functional food system in the islands,” he says.