A spectrum of climate change adaptation: reactive and proactive responses to extreme weather in annual and perennial cropping systems in Ohio

Abstract In the scientific literature on climate change adaptation in agricultural contexts, there is a common distinction between reactive management strategies (i.e. those implemented to address the immediate impacts of extreme events after they occur) and proactive management strategies (i.e. practices oriented toward long-term mitigation). In this article, we compare farmers’ responses to extreme weather events, focusing largely on 2019’s excess precipitation, in both annual row cropping (corn, soy, wheat) and perennial winegrowing systems in the Midwestern state of Ohio to show how different management strategies do not necessarily fit into such discrete categories, but rather exist along a spectrum. Furthermore, we show how the characterization of such adaptive management practices is contingent on the particular cropping systems in which they are examined. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 20 row crop farmers and 14 winegrowers throughout central Ohio, this article highlights farmers’ perspectives on these issues and in their own words, from the need to increase flexibility in the timing of management activities—including strategies of waiting—to their implementation of tile drainage that is interpreted in some instances as anticipatory and in others as reactive. Taken together, this analysis offers an integrative, holistic model of adaptive management approaches to climate change under these distinct cropping systems.