Greenland's Farms Boom - Growing Season 2 Wks Longer Than 30 Yrs Ago

[hatrack]

Egede, a Greenland potato farmer, has little time to admire the view. He spends most of his days working in the fields and looking at the dramatically steep table mountains at the end of the fjord and the blue and white icebergs in the bay. But today he's more concerned about a broken water pipe. "The plants need a lot of water," he says, explaining that the soil here is very sandy, a result of glacier activity.

But he could still have a decent harvest. He pulled 20 tons of potatoes from the earth last summer, and his harvests have been growing larger each year. "It's already staying warm until November now," says Egede. And if this is what faraway scientists call the greenhouse effect, it's certainly a welcome phenomenon, as far as Egede as concerned.

Egede is a pioneer and exactly the kind of man Greenland's government, which has launched an ambitious program to develop agriculture on the island, likes to see working the land. Sheep and reindeer farmers have already been grazing their herds in southern Greenland for many years. As part of the new program, cattle will be added to the mix on the island's rocky meadows, part of a new dairy industry officials envision for Greenland. One day in the near future, the island's farmers could even be growing broccoli and Chinese cabbage.

There are many reasons for this agricultural boom, the most important being a rise in temperature. For most people on earth, global warming still consists of little more than computer models and a number that seems neither concrete nor threatening: an increase of about 4.5°C (8.1°F) in the average temperature worldwide by the year 2100. But what this will mean for Greenland is already becoming apparent today. In Qaqortoq, for example, the average temperature increased from 0.63°C to 1.93°C in the last 30 years. This, in turn, has added two weeks to the growing season, which now amounts to 120 days. With up to 20 hours of daylight in the summer, those two weeks make a huge difference.

EDIT

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,434356,00.html

[Odin2005]

1. When sea levels start to rise...

The only Danish territory left will be Greenland.

[mccoyn]

2. Farming where qlaciers were doesn't work well.

There's no topsoil under glaciers and the ground is sand that doesn't hold water. I grew up in a town that was essential a glacial drainage 10,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated and the ground is still sandy and lacks minerals required for cash crops like corn to be successful. Blueberries do well there and blackberries grow wild. Its hard to get anything else to grow without lots of fertalizer.

[Oerdin]

3. That depends.

Ever heard of glacial till? If you are at the end of the glacer then the soil is fairly good though it tends to be sandy but if you are in the uplands or the upper valleys then, yes, there won't be much in the way of topsoil.