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NORTH DAKOTA (KXNET) — Wildfire smoke can cover thousands of square miles in North Dakota for several days. This can affect your breathing and health, as well as the health of your animals.
But our crops and plant life are impacted in a different way. In Wednesday’s Eye on Ag & Energy: how wildfire smoke affects our state’s agriculture.
According to pioneer.com, wildfire smoke can reduce sunlight and create ozone, both are not good for crops. Crops need sunlight and carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
So, a decrease in sunlight and an increase in ozone — which is oxygen — is not good for our agriculture.
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However, scientists say wildfire smoke can diffuse sunlight at times. This means sunlight can hit a patch of smoke and scatter its beams in a lot of different areas, hitting parts of a plant or crop that usually does not get enough sunlight.
Overall, it’s important for farmers to learn about the pros and cons of smoke on our crops
“At a basic level, plants use photosynthesis to capture the sun’s energy to grow, fire is the flip side of that, plants yield the energy that they stored in the plant structure. What’s given off by the fire is smoke,” said David Weise, a research forester for the U.S. Forest Service at the Pacific Southwest Research Station.
Some crops are also better in smoky conditions. Soybeans — a big North Dakota crop — handle haze and smoke better than other crops, like corn. Simply because soybeans are typically smaller and lower to the ground than corn, avoiding lots of the negative impacts of smoke.
