Agricultural ecosystems are key elements of the life support systems of all developed societies. These systems are so dominated by human factors that a reasonable understanding of their responses to large-scale changes in the physical environment necessarily requires consideration of economic influences on human decision making, which modulate the biophysical aspects of agricultural production. The economics, in turn, are critically influenced by the biological responses to the physical environment, which determine yield potential and commodity supplies. A credible treatment of these interactions requires integration of physical, biological and social science approaches and tools. This research project will jointly assess the predicted economic and agricultural impacts of evolving climate changes caused by gradually increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. A recently developed methodology, which focuses on the response of farm-level decisions to changes in the physical environment, will form the basis of the study. The project will consider the major grain crops of North America, for which reasonably comprehensive agronomic, climatological and economic data are available. The proposed research will contribute to the scientific understanding of interactions between human and biophysical determinants of food production and prices in the context of a changing climate. It will track the effects of gradual climate changes through a set of physiological crop models to a sequential linear programming model of farm-level decision making, and is thus truly interdisciplinary in nature. The results will provide tools which can contribute usefully to informed decisions regarding the consequences of both energy and agricultural policy on landscape patterns, food production and prices.
