What Plants Or Animals Are Raised In Greenland

Climate modify has made summers in Greenland warmer and drier, leading to a decline in the number of sheep farms on the isle. Peter Essick/Aurora Creative/Getty Images hide caption

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Peter Essick/Aurora Creative/Getty Images

Climate change has made summers in Greenland warmer and drier, leading to a reject in the number of sheep farms on the island.

Peter Essick/Aurora Creative/Getty Images

It'southward a cool August forenoon every bit I ride in Magnus Hansen'southward dented pickup truck through the verdant hills of due south Greenland. Nosotros're in search of his flock of 500 sheep grazing on the slopes. Soon we see 3 animals grazing past the gravel on the dirt road. The two ewes and a lamb first middle the states warily from the bushes, so scurry across the road. Nearby is a shimmering fjord, but less than 10 miles away, though we tin't meet it, lies Greenland'southward mighty ice cap, a mile thick in the center of the island.

Hansen's sheep subcontract, called Tasilikulooq, sits amongst glassy lakes and sloping hills. When I first arrive here, his red tractor sits next to a dusty snowmobile, a reminder of the punishing cold he and his family brave each winter. But information technology'southward not the brutality of the coming winter that concerns Hansen right now. He's worried most the travails of the summer.

That's considering information technology has been horribly dry out hither for months. Hansen fears that his flock of sheep might be malnourished if the pastures don't soon recover from a hot, dry summer so he can harvest the grass for wintertime hay feeding.

"The seasons here have been very difficult lately," says Hansen. The average brute in his flock in the summertime of 2015 was 2 to 4 pounds lighter than normal. Hot summers over the by decade have cost him thousands of dollars in losses, he says.

Greenland is an Chill nation, only along the fringe of the island, between the ice and sea, lies land. And in the south portion of the country, this land is abundant. The fields and shrubbery of Tasilikulooq are amid the verdant rolling hills that inspired the Vikings to telephone call this place Greenland. They arrived around 985 A.D. and began raising livestock, offset a tradition that a few dozen Inuit sheep farms continue in this region today, providing meat, primarily, for a tiny portion of the population.

Since Greenland's 60,000 citizens rely nearly entirely on nutrient imports from Kingdom of denmark and other European countries, farmers and officials have hoped that steadily rising temperatures, and shorter winters, would spur a growth in agriculture here. (Summer temperatures have risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Greenland since 1975, increasing the growing season by ii weeks.) And media stories near Arctic gardening in greenhouses or the warming temperatures accept hyped the possibilities.

Instead, says Aqalooraq Frederiksen, a tertiary-generation farmer who works at a regional farmer help agency, the dry out summers are diminishing the prospects for Greenlandic farming.

Contempo summers have been both warm and dry, causing drought in south Greenland, says John Cappelen, a climatologist at Danish Meteorological Found, which maintains climate data for the island.

"In 2015, for instance, nosotros didn't take spring," said Greenlandic agronomical consultant Henrik Motzfeldt Egede. "It but went from a very cold winter to a hot, dry summer." He says growth in pastures for livestock was "very bad as a result." Meanwhile, the number of sheep farmers in Greenland has fallen from 74 in 1983 to about 37 farms today, says Frederiksen.

To compensate, farmers try to irrigate their pastures and hayfields, and they purchase animal feed to supplement the hay in the winter time. On an Baronial morning by a dock near Tasilikulooq I watched a loader moving giant plastic numberless of fertilizer and sheep provender, 1,850 tons in all, from a pocket-size ship onto shore. Such shipments are a lifeline for sheep farmer Miki Egede, whose nearby farm, ane of the largest on the island, boasts 600 sheep and 31 cattle.

"Our incomes just oasis't been able to continue up with the overall increase of our expenses," says the farmer, who is no relation to the consultant. "Expenses in the form of fertilizers, fodder for the animals, and everyday items. Looks like information technology is the sheep farmers with the fewest sheep that were hit the hardest."

Government subsidies, meant to support Greenland's farms, now stand at $1.eight 1000000 per twelvemonth. There are persistent rumors that the authorities could cut those subsidies, however, to save costs given that the sector is shrinking and provides relatively little food to Greenlandic citizens.

"This year we too had drought throughout nigh of the early summer, but limited rainfall belatedly in the summer made the harvest better than last year," says Egede. But astringent drought has struck Greenland in 2 of the by v years and recently published research suggests the trend may proceed because of large calibration changes in Arctic weather systems.

Efa Poulsen grows turnips, potatoes and other vegetables on the Upernaviarsuk farm in southern Greenland. Eli Kintisch for NPR hibernate caption

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Eli Kintisch for NPR

Efa Poulsen grows turnips, potatoes and other vegetables on the Upernaviarsuk subcontract in southern Greenland.

Eli Kintisch for NPR

A trip to the government's testing farm near the southern tip of the island underscores some of the challenges farmers confront here. Efa Poulsen, the gardener, tests different varieties of carrots, turnips, potatoes and feed crops like barley. Inside 2 greenhouses he is growing other vegetables, including tomatoes and cucumbers.

Poulsen removes plastic sheeting from a gear up of turnip plants and pulls upward a turnip and cuts off its greens. After wiping off the clay with a towel, he cuts me a slice; it's well-baked and sweetness in my mouth. The farm grows tasty vegetables and trains a few sheep farmers a year, says Frederiksen. Only the farm tin can't produce enough food to encompass the costs of the operation.

A scattering of farmers have tried to grow vegetables for human consumption in gardens or fields, just nearly all have found it unprofitable since yields are low and there'southward limited availability of subcontract labor. So the few dozen experiments with growing vegetables hither, including a few greenhouses, only serve to feed the families that maintain the gardens.

Simply there may be ane solution to the woes facing Greenland's farms — bees, says Ole Guldager, a commercial beekeeper who has been maintaining beehives in Narsarsuaq, a small airport town about the southern tip of the island. The function-time beekeeper produces between 550 and 650 pounds of honey annually for sale in groceries and tourist shops.

The hives thrive during hot summers when southern Greenland's plentiful wildflowers are in flower. Guldager is convinced that beekeeping would permit farmers to "brand a living without beingness subsidized." But beekeeping hasn't caught on. He is the only commercial beekeeper on the isle.

Equally for the remainder of Greenland's sheep farmers, with the number of farms failing, many of them have moved on to fishing, hunting, mining and other professions in search of a meliorate source of livelihood.

Eli Kintisch is a freelance announcer in Washington, D.C. Reporting for this story was supported past the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/11/17/502349923/climate-change-is-making-greenland-warmer-but-farmers-there-are-struggling

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