The $20B question hanging over America’s struggling farmers

As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food. Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s throttling production in the United States.

Farmers and ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to a new Farm...