Late sowing date as an adaptive strategy for rainfed bean production under warming and reduced precipitation in the Mexican Altiplano?
Graphical abstract
Introduction
A recent assessment of the future of rainfed agriculture under climate change scenarios forecast positive yield responses of crops in most of temperate dryland regions (Bradford et al., 2017). In these regions, expansion of rainfed agriculture is expected to occur thanks to concomitant increases of both soil moisture and temperature. In general terms, it is expected that rainfed agriculture in mid and high latitudes will be benefited under climate change scenarios whereas tropical and subtropical regions will suffer a decrease in its suitability (Bradford et al., 2017; Schlenker and Lobell, 2010). Suitability of rainfed agriculture depends on the interaction among temperature, precipitation and soil texture (Meng et al., 2016; Ramankutty et al., 2002). Some current areas of rainfed agriculture are located out of their optimal climatic conditions, such as those located at high altitudes.
The Altiplano of central Mexico, which is distributed across tropical and subtropical regions, consists of several semiarid and arid ecosystems, including shrublands, desert scrub, and grasslands (Rzedowski (1978)). Arid lands sustain 21 % of the Mexican population with 24 % of this proportion living under rural conditions (Arredondo Moreno and Huber-Sannwald, 2011). In spite of the limiting conditions, rainfed agriculture has been practiced since pre-Columbian times, and it remains today as the main self-sustaining cropping system, however, as a highly vulnerable one. One component of this vulnerability comes from the highly variable climatic conditions which include large scale recurrent droughts or early frost, as well as small scale extreme events such as hailstorms. The Altiplano of Mexico displays conditions that favor hailstorm formation such as high temperatures in late spring and early summer, convective cloud formation, and atmospheric instability (Gay y Garcia et al., 2016). This coincides with the report by Knight and Knight (2001) that mentioned that hailfall is overall more frequent in late spring and early summer. Hence, the seasonality of rainfall coincides with the first developmental stage of rainfed crops from May to July (Acosta et al., 2004), when they are most vulnerable. Even though there are no records, neither meteorological nor insurance coverage about hailstorm incidence and damage for rainfed agriculture in the Mexican Altiplano, its geographic distribution as well as its average altitude (around 2000 ± 300 masl) turn the region into a region of high incidence for hailfall and early frost. Cecil and Blankenship, 2012 for instance, using satellite passive microwave imagers, identified the Mexican Altiplano as a region with an incidence range between three and six hailfalls per year.
Two of the more relevant atmospheric conditions for hail formation, high minimum temperature and rainfall intensity, are expected to rise under the scenarios of enriched atmospheric CO2 and warmer climates (Botzen et al., 2010). Consequently, it is likely that hailstorms will become more frequent, as will the associated damage to agriculture. For low-input agriculture; such as rainfed crops, few adaptation strategies are feasible. In the Mexican Altiplano the crop growing season is constrained to the summer monsoon season, ending with the arrival of the first fall frost, i.e., from June to October. On the other hand, for rainfed agriculture a scenario of +2 °C in the future may represent better temperature conditions for growth and development and perhaps widening the growing season. Beans are the main staple food together with corn for the Mexican rural population. Ever since precolumbian times, beans have been sowed between June and November in tropical and subtropical regions (Ruiz Corral et al. (2013)). The development of regional landraces allowed to sow beans under harsher conditions such as the Mexican Altiplano, however facing regularly drought and shorter growing cycles (early july to end of october).
Observed climatic trends in the region, however, might open a window of opportunity to carry out rainfed agriculture in the climate change era avoiding the maximum period of hail, as weather trends show a switch for the wettest month to September instead of July (Delgado Balbuena, 2016; Rodriguez-Robles, 2016; Romero Centeno et al. (2016)). In parallel, early frost events which previously occurred in early October are occurring in November (Romero Centeno et al. (2016)). If these trends persist in coming years, an opportunity for rainfed agriculture to avoid hailstorms will consist in delaying sowing to early August to avoid the most intense hailfall period. This could be possible if precipitation trends remain with September as the wettest month to maintain adequate moisture, and there should be time for crops to mature before the frost period.
We experimentally tested a late sowing date for rainfed bean cultivation through the manipulation of climate conditions to impose under field conditions a 2 °C increase in canopy temperature and a one third (33 %) decrease in precipitation relative to current ambient conditions. Our aim was to examine for the Altiplano of México whether late-sowing rainfed beans can grow and develop and reach maturity. We posed the hypothesis that warmed conditions should enhance/promote the growth and maturation of rainfed beans even under a reduced precipitation in the climate conditions of the Altiplano.
Section snippets
Site
The study was conducted at the CENID Vaquerias, a site belonging to INIFAP (National Institute for Forestry, Agronomy and Animal Research) located in the Llanos de Ojuelos geographic subprovince, at the south end of the central Altiplano (21°46′52.25″N, 101°36′29.56″W; 2240 masl). Vegetation corresponds to the southernmost extension of the shortgrass steppe biome in North America (Aguado-Santacruz and García-Moya, 1998). Topography consists of gentle rolling hills (COTECOCA, 1979). Soils are
Infrared heater system performance and micrometeorology
Operation of the infrared radiators was usually in the range of the 2 °C difference between heated and control plots (Fig. 2a, 2015) as intended.
There were a few deviations between pairs of plots that got corrected shortly after detection, except at the end of the study where all plot pairs were uncoupled for few days due to the loss of electrical power. At this point all plants were mature including bean pods therefore there were no effects on final results. The first year was particularly wet
Cropping in the climate change era
In the Southern part of the Altiplano of Mexico, traditional growing seasons for rainfed crops are delimited by the onset of rains in June and their end with the first frost in early-mid October. This is a region of high risk for rainfed cropping because of occurrence of several climatic phenomena impeding crop maturation. With the current cropping calendar, in addition to irregular precipitation including a long summer drought (i.e. canícula, Arredondo Moreno and Huber-Sannwald, 2011), other
Conclusions
In the Mexican Altiplano, we experimentally imposed a 2 °C increase in canopy temperature and a 30 % decrease in current precipitation, to test how these scenarios of future climate conditions affect the growth and development of rainfed bean cultivation. We also tested whether a late sowing could be used as an adaptation strategy in rainfed agriculture given the observed climatic trends. The test confirmed other studies results regarding that warming accelerates phenology from 1 to 10 days in
CRediT authorship contribution statement
T. Arredondo: Funding acquisition, Conceptualization, Data curation, Validation, Writing - original draft. J. Delgado-Balbuena: Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Writing - review & editing. B. Kimball: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - original draft. M. Luna-Luna: Investigation, Project administration, Supervision. E. Yepez-Gonzalez: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. E. Huber-Sannwald: Writing - original draft. E. García-Moya: Funding
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
Authors thank INIFAP for permitting the use of their facilities at CENID Vaquerias in Ojuelos, Jalisco. We also thank to two anonymous reviewers that made a detailed review of this manuscript. This study was financed by a SEP-CONACYT research grant given to TA with reference number 220788. JDB also thank SEP-CONACYT grant ref. 220788 for their postdoctoral scholarship.
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Current address: CENID Vaquerias km 10 carr Ojuelos- Lagos de Moreno, 37320 Ojuelos, Jalisco.