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CleanTechnica reports
The "flash drought" that came out of nowhere this summer in the US High Plains, afflicting Montana and the Dakotas the worst, has already destroyed more than half of this year's wheat crop, going by some recent field surveys. Considering that the region is now one of the top wheat-growing regions in the world, the damage is very notable.
These so-called flash droughts are expected to become considerably more common over the coming decades as the climate continues warming and weather patterns continue changing.
[...] Something that's interesting to note here is that 2011, only 6 years back, was actually one of the wettest years on record in eastern Montana. Those sorts of rapid swings between extreme precipitation and flooding on the one hand, and extreme flash droughts on the other, are only going to become more common from here on out. Eventually, most of the agriculture in the region will have to cease.
Grist calls this a Cereal Killer.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 11 2017, @09:29PM
I think that's something a lot of people don't understand.
Your standard oatmeal may not contain wheat as an ingredient, but if it's made in the same facility as cream of wheat or other flour bearing products or if the oats were shipped in the same trucks or anything like that it may contain micrograms of wheat dust, which is enough to cause some people significant issues or even send them to the hospital. It's like if you had food that was made in the same building as a botulism toxin refinery using some of the same equipment; you'd pay extra for the food made elsewhere even if they assured you that they didn't put any botulism toxin in it.
So while you could buy cheap oatmeal before and have a decent shot at not getting sick from it depending on your sensitivity (I have sometimes gotten sick from the standard Quaker oatmeal), if you wanted to be certain you'd have to roll your own or maybe buy expensive organic small-batch free-range oatmeal where each grain of oat was individually hand washed. Now there are mainstream lines so you just pay a small premium.
I emailed Quaker about the subject a couple years ago and they said that they couldn't guarantee that their oatmeal didn't contain wheat, for the above reasons. Now they have GF oatmeal for not much more than their standard, so I can have a cheaper reliably GF breakfast than the comparable alternatives of a few years ago.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek