This post from farmer Edward Westerfield shows us why we need to pay attention to what farmers tell us about the changing weather patterns (paragraph separations are mine). 

Fire about one mile from my home in Baja in the last hour. My home on the beach will be fine but it makes me think about what more than a half century of farming has taught me.

Two weather events marked vegetable production in California like clockwork. One was that rains would start in the fall almost exactly on November 1 after a long summer of no rain – meaning time to make sure all tomatoes and other non rain-tolerant crops were out of the field and on their way to market. The other was the Santa Ana winds. Every fall they would come within a few days of September 21, the fall equinox. It defined our plantings in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border where the salad and brassica crops feed the country every winter. I was trained to start planting the day the Santa Ana winds ended so that the soil temperatures would have dropped enough.

This year no rains have come to southern California or northern Baja in 8 months. ZERO! And the Santa Ana winds came this week – almost 4 months late, and fiercer than any on record. Some people with political agendas are trying desperately to point fingers but us farmers know the problem. The clock is broken.

Global Warming…or Climate Change if you like…is a real thing. Ask the weather forecasters whose models are all mucked up now. Ask the ski slope operators who need to use their snow machines more often now. Ask the farmers. Especially ask the farmers. Their clock is the ticking of the seasons. And the clock is broken.