Last summer, Washington experienced a record-breaking heatwave. The three-day stretch of scorching heat not only had a catastrophic effect on the state’s residents, but also its crops, thus impacting the food supply. I recorded 116 degrees at my house on June 28th, 2021. I saw news reports of entire fields of potatoes and cherries being destroyed, and fruits that stopped growing from the unusually high temperatures. With so much devastation to farmers, I began wondering how farmers are going to cope with the inevitability of future heat waves.

Currently, two-thirds of the global population experiences water scarcity. One-fifth of the world population currently lives in conditions of physical water scarcity, where there is not enough water to meet their demands, and one-quarter of the world’s population experiences economic water scarcity, where their region has enough water to meet the necessary personal, agricultural, environmental, and industrial needs, but lack sustainable accessibility. Existing literature determined that water scarcity occurred more often in areas where irrigation systems had low water productivity (WP) and water use efficiency (WUE), primarily caused by a lack of sufficient irrigation scheduling technology.

In the summer prior to my sophomore year, I remember reading a Wall Street Journal article titled “Feeding Billions, a Grain at a Time,” discussing how both rising food prices and climate change threatened decades of progress on global agriculture. Then, a few months later, The New York Times launched an article series called “The Food Chain,” highlighting issues in international agriculture. I found it puzzling that while two prominent newspapers were featuring agriculture coverage, very few people in the United States were aware of global food issues.