Seasonal Patterns That Farmers Trusted for Generations Have Suddenly Turned Unpredictable

Yves here. We’ve discussed how the super El Nino that is starting will greatly lower agricultural output, as will widespread fertilizer shortages and high diesel prices. These adverse developments come against a background of climate change altering seasonal behaviors farmers have relied on for deciding when to plant and harvest, harming farm output.

By Sanket Jain, an award-winning independent journalist and documentary photographer based in Western India’s Maharashtra state. His work has been featured in over 35 publications, including MIT Technology Review, Devex, Wired, Telegraph, Thomson Reuters Foundation, The Nation, British Medical Journal, Verge, USA Today, Progressive Magazine, and others. He has won more than 15 journalism awards. Read his stories at www.sanketjain.in. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections

Farmers in Jambhali, a village of 5,000 in western India, have long turned to 80-year-old Satgonda Patil for advice on when to plant or harvest their crops. For more than six decades, his deep knowledge and uncanny instincts helped him and his neighbors succeed and avoid weather-related losses.

That started to change about five years ago. Rains arrived late, then early. Summers stretched on longer, and pests appeared at unfamiliar times. Financial losses soon followed.

In October 2025, Patil grew cauliflower on his 1.5-acre field, but he couldn’t harvest the crop. It wilted as a result of a soilborne fungal disease favored by warmer temperatures. A month later, Patil tried growing cabbage, but pests arrived early and spread quickly. He spent over 50,000 Indian rupees ($527) on pesticides but couldn’t save the crop.

The problem, Patil said, is no longer just one bad season.

“As temperatures are increasing every year, so are the pest attacks,” he explained. “No matter how much I spray, these pests just don’t go away.”

Patil has lots of company around the world.

Climate change has disrupted steady seasonal patterns that generations of farmers have relied upon. They have scrambled to adapt by adopting new irrigation techniques, changing crops, or adjusting the timing of planting. Still, losses are mounting. One study projects that adaptations can alleviate only about 23% of projected global crop losses by 2050 and 34% by the end of the century.

For every 1°C rise in global temperatures, food production is expected to fall enough to reduce the average available food supply by about 120 calories per person per day, roughly 4.4% of recommended calorie consumption. Today, global agriculture produces more than enough food, but this supply is unevenly distributed because of income inequality, price volatility, and gaps in access and infrastructure, leaving many undernourished.

Even modest declines in production could worsen food insecurity. Although the Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, current policy trajectories put the world on track for warming well above 2°C this century, levels at which these losses would grow significantly.

Warming Oceans Scramble Rainfall Patterns

Climate change is altering the patterns that once made seasons predictable. One study published in the journal Nature Communications found that the links between ocean temperatures and rainfall are shifting, making seasonal forecasts less reliable in some regions.

Unlike land and air, which respond quickly to daily temperature changes, the ocean absorbs and stores heat over long periods, releasing it slowly, explained Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and a senior author of the study. The ocean has a kind of “memory” that allows conditions such as El Niño and La Niña, natural cycles of ocean warming and cooling in the Pacific, to influence atmospheric circulation and, in turn, shape rainfall patterns across many regions, she added.

“Historical relationships we have relied on for seasonal forecasting may no longer hold as consistently,” she said.

In some regions, forecasts may improve as climate signals become clearer.

“Forecasting systems will need to be continually updated to account for these evolving dynamics,” she added.

Researchers have begun mapping how predictable seasonal rainfall may become in different parts of the world.

“One notable result is a decrease in predictability over northern Amazonia during Northern Hemisphere winter, where seasonal rainfall becomes harder to anticipate,” said Phong Le, a scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, who led the study. In contrast, predictability is projected to increase across many tropical regions in several seasons.

Climate change is also altering the timing of seasonal events. A study published in Science shows that these timings can shift unevenly across species, throwing ecological interactions out of sync and often creating unpredictable outcomes.

“Even small shifts in seasonal events, like floods arriving a week earlier, can have cascading ecological impacts,” said Jonathan Tonkin, a professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a senior author of the study. Because species are closely linked to one another, a change in timing can ripple through entire systems: “Ecosystems are highly interconnected systems, and changes to any one member can ripple out through the whole system.”

When Nothing Works Anymore

Patil said seasonal signs he once relied upon have stopped making sense.

“Sometimes it feels like it will rain,” he said. “The next moment, it is blazing hot. It’s just unpredictable.”

As we spoke in March, with temperatures already crossing 38°C (100.4°F), the television showed a rain forecast for the evening. Leaning on his walking stick, he made his way toward the sorghum field about 100 meters away.

“If it rains even for 10 minutes, I will lose everything,” he said, inspecting the harvest-ready crop that could be damaged by even a brief shower. Luckily, the forecast was wrong. It didn’t rain.

Farmer Yallappa Naik, 68, from western India’s Nandani village, did what farmers are told to do when one crop fails: Try again.

In June 2023, he planted sugarcane, following the calendar he had used for decades. Then, heavy rainfall began.

“The water was at least seven feet deep in the field for over 10 days,” he said.

Nothing survived.

He tried again with sorghum, wheat, and vegetables. Those crops withered in extreme heat, rotted in untimely rain, or were eaten by pests he had rarely seen before.

In October 2024, he sowed sorghum. By March, much of that crop had failed. Weeds spread quickly, returning even after he cleared them three times.

“In the past five decades, I had never seen so many weeds,” he said.

He lost $316 that season.

Naik isn’t alone. Studies show that climate change is making the Indian monsoon more erratic, with greater swings between long periods of dry spells and intense rainfall.

“In recent decades, the Indian summer monsoon has become far less predictable than it once was,” said Hamza Varikoden, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, who led the monsoon study.

Instead of bringing steady rainfall across the season, the monsoon in South Asia is increasingly marked by short bursts of intense rain followed by longer dry spells, he said. Even when total rainfall remains similar, each season can bring wild, unpredictable swings between floods and drought.

“The seasonal cues that farmers traditionally rely on are becoming less predictable, making agricultural planning more challenging,” said Catherine George, a doctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany.

Climate change is a major factor behind precipitation shifts. The atmosphere can hold 6-10% more moisture for every 1°C of warming, leading to heavier downpours. Climate models suggest that although overall rainfall may increase in the future, it is likely to come with greater variability and more extreme events, Varikoden said.

Adaptation Under Constraints

Naik has now narrowed his farming to a three-month window.

For much of the year, he says, extreme weather makes it too risky to grow crops.

So instead of cultivating crops that take six months or longer to mature, he now focuses on crops that grow in a short duration, such as beets.

“It brings down my risk of loss to some extent,” he said.

Experts said the solution to increasingly erratic weather lies not just in better forecasts, but in rethinking how to prepare for extremes.

This can mean adjusting sowing dates based on updated forecasts, choosing crop varieties that can withstand heat or short dry spells, and diversifying crops to reduce risk, said Ancy Pushpaleela, a researcher at Cochin University of Science and Technology in India.

In addition, farmers can better cope with uneven rainfall by storing water, conserving soil moisture, and using irrigation more efficiently during dry periods, Pushpaleela added. Managing groundwater more effectively can also help buffer against both droughts and sudden downpours.

“The goal is to shift from relying on precise predictions to managing risk, so that communities are better prepared for a wider range of possible outcomes,” Foufoula-Georgiou said.

But for Patil, the 80-year-old farmer in Jambhali, the loss is not only financial. It is the erosion of a system he spent his whole life learning. There was a time, he recalled, when harvests were so abundant that there wasn’t enough space in the house to store grain.

Now, he says, even getting enough to eat twice a day feels sufficient.