expected to experience significantly wetter- than-normal conditions, which can lead to heavy rain, flooding, mudslides and coastal erosion fueled by high El Niño sea levels. What Does This Mean for Agriculture? The prediction for El Niño is not simply “more rain.” Rather, rainfall may become less evenly distributed, with more of it arriving in concentrated storms and longer dry intervals separating major precipitation events. Additionally, a Super El Niño is like a candle that burns hotter and faster, where we expect it to last a shorter amount of time, but the outcomes will be more extreme. While models and other tools are able to predict the probability of events, averages become less useful when anomalous extremes increasingly determine outcomes and agricultural impacts. Projected climate risks for California farmers include increasing heat and precipitation volatility, drought-to-flood swings, wildfires and the difficulty of relying on historical averages. With a “thirstier atmosphere,” warmer air can increase evaporative demand and draw more moisture from soils, vegetation and water bodies. With warmer nighttime temperatures (such as the record-breaking nighttime temperatures in August 2026), plants may struggle to recover from daytime heat (nighttime warmth can affect respiration, flowering, pollination, fruit
development, ripening and quality) or may not accumulate degree days necessary to trigger flowering. However, despite all of these predictions, some of the more significant flooding events have occurred outside of El Niño years. Models are really only calculating the probability of possible events, not the certainty. Today, modern techniques can leverage machine learning and models, genetics and breeding, biostimulants and other tools to help growers make better decisions despite uncertainty.
Farmers have been trying to hedge uncertainty since the beginning of farming. While we can expect more extreme weather events as the new normal, modern tools help us to predict the probable future. Models can be valuable by presenting several plausible outcomes rather than attempting to identify one certain future. The future of agricultural prediction is less about identifying exactly what anomalous event will occur and more about preparing with resilience against a wide range of more extreme possibilities.
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43 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com October – December 2026
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