Farming for Hum(m)us
In recent decades, the interrelated issues of droughts and floods have become increasingly severe in the agriculture industry. This destructive pattern not only damages the tenuous budgets of farmers, but also has downstream effects on low-income families, taxpayers, and can lead to the flooding of nearby residential communities.
Although climate change has defined much of farmers' relationship with flooding, with rainfall increasing 25% between 1980 and 2013, there are still good farming practices which can mitigate the harms of droughts and flooding on farms. If you reference options afforded the farmer (here, the user) in the "Farm Simulation," there are several considerations for how best to combat this problem on upper and lower plains: drip irrigation systems, riparian buffers, and cover crops. Dominating these considerations, though, is cost; an inclusion which accurately colors the trade-offs real farmers must make while alluding to the collective action problem they're faced with.
Before we can consider politicking, let's look at the science. Even though the use of cover crops drives up costs and while reducing the land available for sellable crops, it pays dividends in the long term when that same soil is less likely to erode and more nutrient rich. In terms of preventing erosion, irrigation systems are made significantly more effective with cover crops since it's these cover crops which directly support increased percolation. By making the soil more porous, instead of washing away in the face of a flood, it can hold more water and allow plants to remain securely rooted in the ground. Moreover, this mitigation of erosion and poor soil health ultimately helps prevent the overuse of fertilizers, which saves money and prevents the increased pollution of surface and ground waters. Conversely, when the issue is too little water from a drought, over crops help retain moisture where it otherwise might have quickly passed through. With nutrients, these transient crops increase the cation-exchange capacity by tying up nutrients which might have otherwise been used in the interceding off-season. According to Liebig's Law of the Minimum, where environments aren't defined by the total resources available but by the most scarce one, all of these issues deserve important consideration.
In terms of policy design, there need to be external structures which encourage farmers to make ecologically conscious decisions which have overall benefits to their communities. Already, there are some natural incentives for farmers to play it safe and employ drip irrigation, riparian barriers, and cover crops, but there is still the opportunity to increase profit by replacing sustainable and safe practices with less natural solutions such as more aggressively fertilizing land and hoping to avoid major droughts or floods. The surrounding ecosystem isn't the only thing at stake here; a disruption in the supply chain of food can drive up the price of whatever is being grown or whatever livestock is expected to eat what's being grown. This specifically impacts low income communities.
These harms aren't necessarily moral failures of farmers but are factors of how our economic system shapes behavior. Sometimes this shaping is even to the extent of duress, where a business is given the ultimatum to adapt or go out of business. Policy makers have a responsibility to correct for this possible externality. There should be differentiation though, creating incentives for smaller family farms and disincentives for larger corporate farms.
