Justin Ralph estimates he's made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They're accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans and wheat to market.
What they're not used to are the distances they've had to drive the past couple years, a consequence of bad weather that's only expected to increase in their area as a result of climate change. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky — a massive facility that bought and stored millions of bushels of grain from farmers. But it was destroyed in the 2021 tornado outbreak that killed dozens of people and leveled entire parts of the town, and the company that ran it shut down. Now, instead of driving ten minutes, they sometimes travel an hour or more.
