Global warming a boon to Icelandic farmers?

Beneath a snowy mountain range, jewel-green spires of wheat poke up from the earth in defiance of Iceland’s late winter. In this rugged landscape along the southern coast, Ólafur Eggertsson leads an emerging movement of farmers who are capitalizing on global warming to grow new crops.

Even as last October’s economic collapse inflated the cost of imported food, Eggertsson harvested Iceland’s first homegrown wheat for human consumption. At an extreme latitude just three degrees south of the Arctic Circle, warmer weather emboldened him to plant this temperate cereal crop.

In a southern, maritime location, Eggertsson benefits from the ideal climate for Iceland’s first wheat production, says Sveinn Runólfsson, the director of the Soil Conservation Service in nearby Gunnarsholt. But Eggertsson’s pioneering effort is still “quite extraordinary because ten years ago, nobody would have dreamed about growing wheat in Iceland,” adds Runólfsson.

Grain production represents a small but increasing share of Iceland’s one percent of arable land. The area of barley production has grown more than ten-fold since 1990, says Ingvar Björnsson, a farming advisor in a barley-growing district of North Iceland. In the last two decades, a rise in mean annual temperature of nearly two degrees Fahrenheit facilitated this expansion. Farmers hope that production of winter wheat will follow the same pattern as barley.

After a successful harvest last fall, Eggertsson jumped from experimentation to commercial production. Under his cluster of white-washed buildings with red roofs made of corrugated iron – typical of Icelandic farms – Eggertsson grinds the wheat into whole-grain flour and packages it in paper bags labeled ‘ĺslenskt Heilhveiti’ (‘Icelandic Whole Wheat’). He then sells his product directly from the farm, as well as at bakeries and shops in the capital, Reykjavík.

“This facility looks primitive,” admits the soft-spoken farmer with white hair and the iconic Icelandic blue eyes. “It’s not like a factory business.” Eggertsson prides himself on packaging the wheat at home, where he can interact with customers, instead of sending it to a big processor in Reykjavík.

Wheat production represents only one facet of Eggertsson’s quest to produce as much as possible on the farm. He gets power from a hydroelectric generator that his grandfather built beside a waterfall at the back of the property in 1928. Now he plans on utilizing methane gas from his cows’ manure to live entirely off the grid. “In the future, this farm may be totally self-sufficient and may declare independence from Iceland,” he jokes, flashing a grin.

Barley growing in East Iceland

Before Eggertsson became a symbol of national pride for his success with winter wheat, other intrepid farmers carved a path for barley.

In the greenest part of the country in East Iceland, Eymundur Magnússon became an early adopter of barley in 1980, one year after a severe cold snap. “A lot of people said, ‘you’re crazy for growing barley – it’s too cold, the growing season’s too short,” he relates.

Magnússon, an earnest organic farmer with swept-back brown hair, succeeded by matching an increasingly favorable climate with his own ingenuity. “I’m changing the climate on my farm because I’ve planted shelterbelts around the fields and 1 million trees around the farm,” he says.

The shelterbelts – lines of fast-growing trees – create a warmer microclimate for his crops. They also protect his barley from Iceland’s whipping winds, which tend to snap the plant’s stems or disperse its mature seeds, adds Bjarni Sigurdsson, a professor of forest science at the Agricultural University of Iceland.

Like many Icelandic farmers, Magnússon circumvents the long winter by growing crops in hothouses. He germinates lettuce, parsley and other vegetables indoors in April before transplanting them outdoors two months later.

An advocate of locally grown food, Magnússon aggressively markets his barley as the Icelandic replacement for imported rice. At grocery stores, he personally sells fresh-baked barley bread and fries vegetarian barley burgers for customers. “It’s kind of a performance for me,” he says. “I like acting.”

Magnússon goes to these lengths to overcome suspicions about his grain’s suitability for people. “When I first started selling barley, I had people ask me, ‘Isn’t that for animals?’” he explains. In an agricultural system where animal production predominates, most barley ends us as feed for dairy cows. The European Union, in fact, treats barley as animal fodder, a fact that Icelandic growers exploit to sell their product abroad under less restrictive regulations than for human consumption, according to Eggertsson.

But Magnússon’s promotion of human-grade barley is starting to pay dividends. After the financial collapse in October, he noticed that barley sales increased as rice became more expensive. In late winter, one seafood restaurant in Reykjavík, Fylgifiskar, switched from rice to his barley.

Aside from creative planting and marketing, Magnússon’s progress owes much to the same global warming that other parts of the planet fear. The very shelterbelts that create a favorable microclimate on his farm might not have survived the colder winters of earlier decades, says Runólfsson, the director of the Soil Conservation Service. As an organic farmer, “his life would have been very difficult 25 years ago because of the very short growing season and the very slow breakdown of the organic matter” that preserves soil fertility, adds Runólfsson.

More fundamentally, farmers say that the growing season itself has increased by one week since 1960. As newer varieties of barley mature three weeks early, that means Icelandic farmers benefit from an effective one-month increase in their limited growing season.

A harsh past and an unknown future

Within Iceland’s tight-knit farming community, credit for breeding these new varieties goes to cereals researcher Jónatan Hermannsson. “We have looked for the very early-maturing varieties and tried to breed them to our conditions,” says Hermannsson, an intense man with spiky hair and a mottled brown and gray beard.

Hermannsson, who has studied cereals for 30 years at Iceland’s agricultural university, believes that global warming will free Iceland’s farmers from the climatic bondage of past centuries. “It is terrible to think about the harshness of the weather in the Middle Ages,” he says, “and how people could live here when it was frost and snow every month in the summer.”

When the Vikings settled Iceland under relatively warm conditions in the ninth century, they grew barley until the advent of Europe’s Little Ice Age. Archaeological evidence, including burned bits of barley with stems and some fresh seeds, indicates that barley production lasted until at least the 12th century in North Iceland, says Thomas McGovern, an anthropologist at Hunter College in New York who has done fieldwork in Iceland. In milder South Iceland, recent excavations confirmed the claims of local farmers that barley was grown as late as the 1800s.

But beginning in the 13th century, the Little Ice Age brought colder temperatures to Iceland, ending barley cultivation and hurting grass production as well. During a frigid spell in the late 19th century, thousands of sheep farmers emigrated to North America because low temperatures stunted the growth of their pastures, adds Ólafur Dýrmundsson, a national advisor at the Farmers Association.

With such history in mind, some experts take a cautionary view of climate models that predict global warming. “If we were to return to the 19th century climate, we could not grow any grain,” says Dýrmundsson, who has been involved with climate research in Iceland for 25 years.

The skeptics worry most about a possible shift in the Gulf Stream, the so-called conveyor belt in the Atlantic Ocean that gifts Iceland with a moderate climate despite its near-Arctic latitude. International climate models predict that the continued melting of ice around the North Pole could alter the course of the Gulf Stream and plunge Iceland anew into an arctic climate. “We would be frozen here,” says Runólfsson.

Sigurgeir Hreinsson, who heads a regional farming association in North Iceland and grows about 35 acres of barley for his dairy cows, shares their concern. Despite his desire to try winter wheat if Iceland’s climate continues to warm, Hreinsson believes the risk of losing the Gulf Stream outweighs any potential benefits.

Global warming also carries the danger of introducing diseases that would undermine a selling point of Icelandic agriculture – its purity. While the cold climate poses a challenge to farmers, it has the side benefit of limiting both plant diseases and sheep parasites that thrive in warm weather, as well as the need to combat them with chemicals, experts say.

In milder climates like Ireland and Great Britain, grain growers average eight chemical sprayings per year, says the farming advisor Björnsson. By contrast, Hreinsson and Eggertsson do not feel a need to apply pesticides.

Icelandic farmers tend to focus on the rewards of global warming, however, rather than the risks. “In general, a moderate increase in temperature is going to be good for Icelandic agriculture, especially for grain growing, because yield will be more stable” in the cultivated fields and grazing lands, says Björnsson.

At a time of expensive imports, greater domestic production has the side benefit of buffering Iceland’s food security. “We are growing a substantial part of our need for barley,” says Dýrmundsson. “But we have to import maize and other cereals.”

In South Iceland, however, Eggertsson continues to push the limits of agriculture in his country’s climate. Two years ago, he sowed an experimental plot of Scottish corn, a warm-weather crop that originated in Mexico.

Contrary to scientists’ claims that it would barely grow, “The highest plant went up to my cheek,” he boasts. “There was no maize in it, but the plant itself grows!”

By the end of the 21st century, climatologists estimate that Iceland will get warmer by about three to four degrees, which would place it near the threshold for maize production. But Eggertsson refuses to wait for a distant future. In the meantime, he may salvage the stalks for animal fodder.