Smoke from Wildfires Can Damage Crops, Impact Food Quality

Eastern Oregon isn’t known as an agricultural capital, but the area contains plenty of wheat farms and farmers looking to keep their crops and families supported while producing export-quality wheat. It may not be the verdant west of the state, across the Cascade Mountains, but eastern Oregon has farmers who are just as serious about their work as anywhere else.

In 2018, an especially aggressive wildfire season hit eastern Oregon, beginning in midsummer. “It burned up a lot of range lands in areas that were in crop production, primarily dryland wheat,” says Jacob E. Powell, a professor of crop and soil science in the college of agricultural sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “They had one really bad fire that was 80,000 acres, and then they had some additional fires; about 120,000 acres burned in the region.” He adds that much of that was dryland planted in wheat that was fully matured, and farmers were preparing to start harvesting when these wildfires occurred.

Even for a smaller farming region such as eastern Oregon, the fires started a cascade of consequences. The 2018 fires, Powell says, resulted in “a lot less wheat being shipped down the river.” This had a chain of secondary effects. He says that grain elevators in his area of Oregon saw a 50% to 60% reduction in the number of wheat bushels they received following the fires. “Obviously the producers lost income,” he adds. “A lot of them had crop insurance, which helped cover that. But suddenly there was less work for the local wheat co-op, and all the people who are involved with getting the grain into the elevators. Then there’s the transportation chain of people—in my area, a lot of it is trucked to local elevators, and then it’s put on the Columbia River and barged to Portland. From there, it’s sent primarily to exporters overseas. So [the fire damage] had major implications for everybody involved in that whole supply chain. Suddenly there was less work for them to do.”

The wave of wildfires across the western United States has been impossible to ignore for several years, and scholars have warned that even as the annual fires may burn through and limit their own potential fuel, climate-driven factors may still create circumstances favorable to major fires in the future.

Beyond the inarguable human tragedy of these fires, there is a second crisis these events bring—that of the farmers, and the damage done to their farms. Eastern Oregon was far from the epicenter of recent wildfires. Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina is CEO of San Francisco’s Benchmark Labs, which uses AI technology to predict and prepare for severe weather events, among other disasters. He calls California’s wildfires “catastrophic for the agricultural sector and the West Coast. [And] while California’s Central Valley has seen limited impact, vineyards, specialty crops, and grazing lands from the Sierras to San Diego have been severely impacted.”

The potential damage from wildfires varies widely, say Gus Plamann and Joy Youwakim, agronomists at Biome Makers, a Sacramento, Calif.-based agricultural technology company. “Wildfires can inflict indirect damage to crops and the environment and direct destruction to structures and maintenance expenditures,” Plamann and Youwakim wrote in an email to Food Quality & Safety. “The long-term consequences of these damages can vary depending on the severity of the fire and the resilience of the impacted crops and ecosystems. For example, areas of high-severity fire can impact water quality and soil erosion.”

The Smoke Factor

Wildfires can damage crops the most direct way—by burning them up, or by reshaping the soil of the region. Another troubling factor about wildfires, however, is how smoke and pollutants can easily travel hundreds of miles from their sources.