Translations:Beef/22/en

Production losses caused by climate change

Most of the top 10 beef-producing countries are likely to see lower production with greater temperatures (left) and heat stress (right).

This section is an excerpt from Effects of climate change on livestock § Cattle.[edit]

One of the vectors of bacteria which cause mastitis are Calliphora blowflies, whose numbers are predicted to increase with continued warming, especially in the temperate countries like the United Kingdom. Rhipicephalus microplus, a tick which primarily parasitises cattle, could become established in the currently temperate countries once their autumns and winters become warmer by about 2–2.75 °C (3.60–4.95 °F). On the other hand, the brown stomach worm, Ostertagia ostertagi, is predicted to become much less prevalent in cattle as the warming progresses.

By 2017, it was already reported that farmers in Nepal kept fewer cattle due to the losses imposed by a longer hot season. Cow-calf ranches in Southeast Wyoming are expected to suffer greater losses in the future as the hydrological cycle becomes more variable and affects forage growth. Even though the annual mean precipitation is not expected to change much, there will be more unusually dry years as well as unusually wet years, and the negatives will outweigh the positives. Keeping smaller herds to be more flexible when dry years hit was suggested as an adaptation strategy. Since more variable and therefore less predictable precipitation is one of the well-established effects of climate change on the water cycle, similar patterns were later established across the rest of the United States,