Climate Change and your Grocery Bill

Far too few people are talking about what climate change is doing to our food systems, and yet we all see it every time we buy groceries.

Everyone who’s following the science knows that climate change is real, and it’s here. There’s no meaningful debate on that topic. We see it all around us - increased wildfires, extreme weather, receding glaciers. But the big headline-grabbing hurricanes and wildfire aren’t the only threat: our global food systems are at extreme risk.

Centralization creates risk

There are roughly 30,000 available crops on this planet that people could grow for food. Of those, only 174 (0.0058%) are in commercial production. Of the 174, three (wheat, rice, and corn) provide more than half the calories consumed by humans, and one (soy) provides roughly 3/4 of the plant based protein for humans and livestock alike. Our global food system is wildly, incomprehensibly, and dangerously over-centralized on these four crops. A mutual fund manager who was so over-centralized would be fired for negligence, and over centralizing our food system is far more dangerous. These four have become dominant for a number of reasons - government subsidies being one of the big ones - but also because they were uniquely suited to industrial scale monoculture in the climate we had.

The climate we have now and will have in the future is another matter. And we’re already seeing cracks.

Crop failures are on the rise

As climate change intensifies, the risk to our food intensifies with it. Consumers are already feeling the pain at grocery stores as grocery costs have risen dramatically. Since 2020, food costs have risen almost as fast as crop failure payouts. This isn’t surprising - an insurance payout for a failed crop may help the farmer avoid bankruptcy, but it doesn’t put food on grocery store shelves.

While there aren’t good statistics on crop failures caused by climate change overall, the USDA’s Crop Failure Insurance program is a pretty good proxy - and that program has tracked annual payout increases of 15% or more every year since 2020. According to USDA scientists, climate change is the leading cause and, across the West in particular, droughts caused by climate change. This year, USDA raised the cost for farmers of participating in the program to cover their growing rate of failure. NASA is now predicting a roughly 25% decrease in Corn yields in the US by 2030 and, while the exact numbers are disputed, soy yields will take a big hit as well.

Globally, we’ve seen major shortages in recent years do to climate change. The 2023 rice shortage was mostly do to climate change, including the 40% year over year decline in rice in Pakistan. Sugar and chocolate have also undergone global shortages in 2023 and 2024 due to crop failures. We’ve also seen significant ripple effects - in 2023 the price of organic Soy (which is mostly imported because 99.99% of US soy is genetically engineered) doubled for a large portion of the year due to a trade dispute. As countries start to see their food supplies become more uncertain, we can expect many more such disputes.

Of course, crop failures aren’t the only way climate change can impact our crops - for example, the rainy season ending a few weeks early may not cause a whole crop to fail if there is water available to irrigate, but that irrigation can dramatically increase prices. The environmental impacts of overdrawing natural water reserves to fill those gaps are also significant. That includes collapsing aquifers, salmon being pushed to extinction, and forests dying and burning because the rivers that used to deliver water have been diverted to irrigate almonds and alfalfa.

the solutions are simple, but not NECESSARILY easy

Fundamentally changing the way we produce food is a complex problem. The first and most obvious solution is that we need to dramatically reduce emissions to get to Net Zero as fast as possible - and this includes re-architecting our food systems, which are responsible for up to 1/3 of global emissions.

But climate change isn’t linear: it’s a series of cascade effects and we can’t un-tip the dominoes that have already fallen. We have to adapt what we grow and how we grow it. We have to diversify our food supplies and look at the wide world of species out there that are adapted to different climates and can thrive in the world we have, and the world we will have in the future.

And that’s what we’re doing at Manzanita.

Climate-adapted native and native-derived crops are critical to food security moving forward. Crops like acorn require no irrigation, and foster the protection and restoration of old-growth oak forests. By contrast, almonds - which are non-native and not adapted to California’s unique climates - use 13% of California’s water supply and are mostly exported.

This, quite simply, isn’t sustainable. When you have fire hydrants running dry in the worst fires in L.A. history (and disingenuous politicians pointing at smelt restoration as the cause), it’s time to pull back the curtain on where our water is actually going. The simple truth is that a lot of it is irrigating crops that shouldn’t be growing here in the first place.

In order to secure the future of food, we need to look to the past: native Californians survived on acorn and other native crops for thousands of years before European settlers arrived and still have strong traditions of using these foods. Similar traditions exist all over the world, and we’re starting to see a resurgence - from the Italian government reinvesting in Acorn (which was long stigmatized as a food for poor people outside a few specific communities) to the growing re-adoption of indigenous crops in Africa. California can join that movement and transition to an agricultural system that adapts crops to the land - not the other way around.