Wheat in Whitehorse: how climate change helps feed Canada's remote regions
By Rod Nickel and Kelsey Johnson
Canada’s average temperature over land has warmed by 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1948, with the north warming by 2.3 degrees C, the government said in 2019.
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Large-scale farming with quality harvests remains an elusive challenge in the far north, due to short summers and lack of infrastructure to store and transport commodities. But a warming climate makes crops possible in far-flung, isolated places.
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Climate change has made Canada’s food prices “way more volatile” during the past five years, said Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Prices of salad greens, for example, spiked due to droughts or excessive rains in California.
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Russia and Canada have the greatest “frontier area” suitable for agriculture, with 4.3 million and 4.2 million square kilometers respectively, as early as 2060, based on temperature and moisture levels, though not soil suitability, scientific journal PLOS One said in a February paper. For Canada, that means a potential quadrupling of agricultural land.
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