Preparing agriculture for severe weather — not on Earth, but on the Sun

CATHY WURZER: Here in Minnesota, we love to talk about the weather. And that includes the weather wherever it's happening, like, well, on the surface of the sun. The Northern Lights are a good example.

Bursts of energy from the sun pull on the Earth's magnetic field and cause the neon green, purple, and yellow waves we see in the sky. For a long time, that was the only way the sun's geomagnetic storms were even noticeable to life on Earth. But severe solar weather can also upset technologies we now depend on, like the electric grid and satellite systems.

It's not clear if or when a big storm will happen, but it could spell disaster for every sector of the economy if it does. Our next guest has learned a lot about this in recent years. University of Minnesota agronomy and plant genetics professor Kathryn Draeger went on sabbatical and found herself in a solar weather wormhole. She joins us now from this year's Space Weather Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. Professor, welcome.

KATHRYN DRAEGER: Hello, Cathy. Thank you very much for having me join you.

CATHY WURZER: I'm very excited to talk to you. I am quite curious. I mean, you are a plant geneticist. You're an agronomy professor. And now, you're interested in solar storms. How did that happen?

KATHRYN DRAEGER: Yeah. I'm actually more of a soil scientist. But along the same lines, for all these years, I've oriented my academic gaze towards the Earth, and towards crops, and towards soil. But following COVID, when we were looking at all the disruptions in food supply chains, and in Minnesota, many of you know, we had some really severe disruptions.

For example, at one point, very sadly, we were euthanizing 10,000 hogs a day because of the disruptions in meat processing. Following COVID, I really wanted to take a serious look at what other disruptions we should be looking at and thinking about. And I'm very grateful to the university and my boss, the dean of extension, Bev Durgan, who granted me a sabbatical leave so that I could really look at disruption and then scenarios for resilience. And that's when I started this, like you said, deep dive wormhole into space weather.

CATHY WURZER: OK, wow. Well, the National Weather Service, I'm a weather nerd, so I visit that site a lot, has some good information about solar storms on this website. It's buried a little bit, though, but really interesting, if not a tad concerning. They say the actual storm, if there is a big one, could last anywhere from minutes to hours, but the resulting impacts can last for hours to weeks or longer.

And then they say to follow emergency alert system instructions carefully and have an evacuation plan. That kind of caught my attention. How serious can these storms get?

KATHRYN DRAEGER: That's an excellent question. And you are right-- NOAA has a couple of websites that I check daily to see what the level of solar storms are at any given time in the United States. And now, we can also see in Canada as well.

So your question, how severe can they be? Well, they range from absolutely stunningly beautiful and annoying, if you have a disruption in your GPS or other disruptions, to potentially catastrophic. So there is a wide range of impacts that solar storms and space weather can have on us. And interestingly, I didn't know this when I started the research, Cathy, but, interestingly, Minnesota is actually probably the most vulnerable state in the nation for two reasons.

Number one, the farther north you are, the more you're impacted-- just how the farther north you are, the more likely you are to see an aurora, right? As you go south, the auroras come from the poles. So as you move away from the poles, you see that visible sign of a solar storm less and less. So, of course, Minnesota being in our northernmost location.

But secondly, we also have iron ore in our bedrock. And that actually increases the interaction with those geomagnetic storms because of our bedrock. So I've talked to other professors who were like, oh, I'm interested in talking to you, because you're from Minnesota. And you're going to be on the frontline of some of the impacts, if and when they would arrive.

CATHY WURZER: Great. I wonder, you mentioned catastrophic impacts, what's the definition of something like that? I mentioned the electric grid. Are you saying, then, that the electric grid could completely go down in a really big storm?

KATHRYN DRAEGER: I think that there's a lot of people working on hardening our grid and making sure that it's resilient. The whole theme of this conference that I'm attending in Boulder, Colorado is basically to build a nation resilient to space weather.

We have a lot of people working on this, including there was a full hour and a half panel about electric grid reliability in the US and Canada. That said, yes, a severe solar storm like has happened-- we've probably had three severe solar storms since 1859, the most recent probably in 1921. But a solar storm of that magnitude today could have severe consequences to the grid, to the electric grid, resulting in power outages for extended periods of time.

CATHY WURZER: OK. So because you do focus on agriculture, and this is how you got into the wormhole here, how could maybe the food system prepare for something like this?

KATHRYN DRAEGER: That is the part that gets me excited, of course, because as an agricultural scientist, I will tell you at this conference, there's 500 people, mostly astrophysicists, heliophysicist-- I'm learning a whole new disciplinary language that is different from the world of plants, and biology, and microbiology.

But I am the only agricultural scientist here. So I'm really trying to learn about the interactions between solar weather and then extrapolate that into what will be the impacts on agriculture. So from the annoying point of view, like if we had some minor disruptions, a lot of the crops in the United States, some estimates about 75%, are planted using GPS.

If your GPS is down for a half hour, that's a go get a cup of coffee, and it's annoying. If it's down for days, that could delay many farmers from getting a crop in the field, because we've really lost some of those simpler technologies. If you have a 48-row planter and you're depending on GPS to plant and make sure you're planting a large field correctly, losing GPS for a lot of days during planting season could really delay your crop.

So that's on the kind of annoying side of what these solar storms could do for agriculture, to catastrophic, which is, really, if we lose our grid for any length of time, our tractors depend on diesel. In order to get the diesel out of your tank, you need to have electricity to make the gas pump. So we'd have a layer of corresponding impacts as the solar storm got more severe. But I do think there's opportunities for resilience and what that would look like for Minnesota farmers.

CATHY WURZER: Especially curious about that. What do you think? What might some of those preparations look like?

KATHRYN DRAEGER: So, first off, just as a community member, we all have the opportunity. FEMA has their Be Ready website, where they just encourage people to keep supplies on hand just in case of emergency-- always a good idea at the household level. But I think if we look at a more systems level, there's opportunities, for example, as we're doing our clean energy transition, there's opportunity to build more resilience.

For example, having distributed power, instead of having one big wind farm remotely located in the Dakotas, to have a little bit more distributed sources of power, bringing the power closer to where it's used is protective. That's one way that we can build a more protective grid.

I think one of the things, Cathy, is since we had our last really large solar storms, the Carrington event, as it's called, the 1859 event, at that time, about 70% of the US workforce was in agriculture. And as you're probably aware, in 2024, even in Minnesota, that's less than 2% of the population.

So think about the skills and the knowledge that we've lost in just a few generations as people have left the landscape. And so I think this is a really good time for us to ask what skills and knowledge should we be preserving in case you need to revert back to a different type of farming. I'll just give you one quick example.

There's an astrophysicist here at this conference from University of Colorado-Boulder. And when she saw I was an agricultural scientist, she wanted to tell me about how her father had had a check-planting system, which was basically he had a wire with beads on it that would drop the seed, which that's a 100-year-ago technology. But her father still had it sitting around, and she was able to see what it was.

So there's a piece of technology that we've long forgotten about. But who knows? I don't want to say we'd ever be able to use that again. But just if we're thinking in terms of how people have done things, if we didn't have to depend on GPS, for example. Right?

CATHY WURZER: I can hear this in your voice that you are pretty excited about this, and I wish I had more time with you. I wish you well with your research and the fact that you're at the conference at the Space Weather Workshop this week. So I hope you enjoy it.

KATHRYN DRAEGER: Thank you very much.

CATHY WURZER: It's been great talking to you. Kathryn Draeger is statewide director of the University of Minnesota regional sustainable development.