Postcard from Minnesota: Far from drought, but is it a climate haven?
Rancher Matt Hanson stands beside the Root River, which floods more frequently now. He placed his land in conservation trusts because of the increased floods at his family ranch in Chatfield, Minnesota.
Doug Struck
CHATFIELD, Minn.
The West is drying and burning up. The Southwest is baking until it cracks. The South is sweltering, and the East is eyeing rising seas. So, to hide from climate change, Minnesota, tucked away in a northern nook of the country, might seem ideal.
One Harvard researcher even suggested “Climate-Proof Duluth” could be the perfect escape, with no oceans around the city to rise, plenty of cool weather, and all the fresh water one could want with enormous Lake Superior at its feet. Townsfolk talk of “climate refugees” moving there from southernly states.
But Minnesota is changing because of global warming. It is getting too much rain and not enough cold.
Why We Wrote This
While the strains of climate change appear strongest in places affected by drought or rising seas, inland and water-rich areas feel their own pressure to adapt.
“Our state is becoming warmer and wetter,” says Katrina Kessler, head of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
These changes are already altering the state’s landscape, bringing unprecedented flooding, shorter winters, and new challenges for farmers and outdoor enthusiasts. But even as climate change is shifting the traditions and economy of this northern state, many are realizing the need to adapt – and some are already seeking new paths of resilience.
Matt Hanson, for instance, lives on a farm in southeastern Minnesota tucked in the curls of the Root River. His family settled here in Chatfield a century ago. He has about 150 Hereford beef cows and owns 150 acres to grow corn and hay.
When Mr. Hanson was younger, “every year you would get a spring flood from the snow melt. And then we’re usually done for the year,” he recalls. “Now we get floods all summer long. And there have been times that it’s been flooded four times in one summer.
The flooding, which Mr. Hanson blames on the increased rain and the corn and soybean fields upstream that shed the water in torrents, taking soil with it, can kill crops on the fields and endanger his cattle.
“You’d be out there in the middle of the night getting cattle out of the way for the flood so they didn’t get washed away,” he says. “I’ve spent many nights out there with a four-wheeler in the dark and a spotlight. I just got tired of that.”
So he did what farmers and ranchers usually are loath to do: He gave up almost half his land. He put 140 acres into conservation trusts, guaranteeing it would be left wild. He moved his cows and crops off those fields, and planted natural prairie grasses. The 4-foot-tall grasses help hold the soil during floods, shelter wildlife, and keep the river clearer and moving slower.
Minnesota officials say such sustainable land practices – natural buffers along riverbanks, cover crops, and no-till farming that lessen erosion – are needed to deal with the new climate.
Even beyond flooding, the climate changes afoot are serious business for Minnesota, which thrives on outdoor activities and a tourist-luring lore of “the land of 10,000 lakes.”
“We may appear to be sort of quiet and cool from the outside,” says Meredith Cornett, climate change director for The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota and the Dakotas. “But we actually are experiencing some very significant impacts. We are warming more rapidly than most of the other places across the United States.”
Minnesotans say they feel the change.
“When I was a kid, it was nothing to have a three-day blizzard. Now we hardly have anything in the winter,” says Ken Bertelson, chatting with pals at the Freeborn County Fair in Albert Lea, a town of about 19,000 in southern Minnesota. “I guess it’s global warming.”
Beside the cow barn at the fair, teenager Lindsey Nielsen is hosing off Wanda, her showcase breeding heifer, for the third or fourth time on this August day, when the heat index nudged 100 degrees. “The heat can be pretty serious for her,” says Ms. Nielsen.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says in the Twin Cities, average annual temperatures increased by 3.2 degrees F and rainfall increased 30% between 1951 and 2012, greater than the U.S. and global rate. Nighttime lows in the state have steadily marched upward, affecting ice thickness on lakes.
“There’s not as much ‘good ice’ now,” says Dan Brown, who runs Legend Outdoors in Brainerd, in the middle of Minnesota. His company builds “fish houses” that ice fishers tow onto the lakes. “It used to be when I was younger, you could go fishing on Thanksgiving. Now a lot of times you can’t get out until after Christmas or early January,” he said as he took a break from his work.
Of course, the image of rugged Minnesota fishers huddled beneath a blanket over a hole in the ice fades in looking at the accommodations Mr. Brown’s company builds. They are spacious trailers, with heat, television, and kitchens to cook in while the fishing line dangles through a porthole in the floor.
His 24-foot model, for example, weighs 6,000 pounds, and Mr. Brown recommends 17 inches of thick ice before towing it out with a pickup.
The state says winters have shortened by 16 days since 1970, and there are 12 fewer days of lake ice. That trend “translates to millions and millions of dollars,” says Ms. Cornett.
The overheating of global warming can throw local weather patterns into a tizzy. Summer heat waves snapped into floods in Texas, West Virginia, Nevada, Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, and Yellowstone National Park. Globally, catastrophes unfolded in Pakistan and England.
Minnesota, too, is seeing a wild swing of extremes. The state had record-breaking drought in 2021; by midsummer 2022, International Falls was having its wettest year ever. But the general trend is for more rain – according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Midwest has seen a 37% increase in precipitation from heavy rains from 1958 to 2012.
That has brought complications for farmers and periodic flooding to towns. New Ulm, Minnesota, 90 miles southwest of Minneapolis, is nestled between the Minnesota and Cottonwood rivers. The “all day soakers” – gentle rain that fell steadily – no longer are common, says the mayor of the town, Terry Sveine. Instead, the rains fall in fierce downpours, bringing flooding and challenging the sewage system.
What the state authorities call “mega rain” events are four times more common than before 2000, costing millions of dollars in infrastructure damage.
Minnesota has compounded the problem by wholesale drainage projects to shift water off farm fields, sending it crashing down rivers into towns like New Ulm. Mayor Sveine and his friend Scott Sparlin, an environmental consultant, sit in the mayor’s office in the town of 14,000 – once labeled the most German city in America for its heritage – and recall town floods that pumped the rivers dozens of feet higher.
“We need to start to mimic what nature used to do, which was to detain water,” says Mr. Sparlin.
Less obvious changes threaten cherished icons of the state. As summers and winters become warmer, experts predict animals, including moose and the state bird, the loon, along with species of the vast northern forests like paper birch, quaking aspen, balsam fir, and black spruce, will shift northward into Canada. Walleyes may not thrive in warmer lakes, which will increasingly be vulnerable to mats of algae, state administrators say.
“You can joke that, oh, Minnesota has a lot of weather and we can certainly do without the minus 40-degree days,” Ms. Cornett says. “But for a moose, they are actually at risk of overheating in the warming winter conditions.
“There’s a very strong sort of cultural tie and mystique about the Northwoods,” Ms. Cornett says, as she watches a trumpeter swan – another species finding warming unaccommodating – fly above the nearby birch trees. “This is a real pivotal moment.”