In arid Tunisia (100 200 mm annual rainfall), depleted cereal fallows are a prominent feature of the desertified landscape.
In the early 1980s, the situation on the northern part of the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso was characterized by expanding cultivation on lands marginal to agriculture, declining rainfall, low and declining cereal yields, disappearing and impoverishing vegetation, falling ground-water levels and strong outmigration.
The area sown to cereals, mainly wheat, in 1998/99 season is estimated at 1.3 million hectares, slightly lower than the target due to inadequate rainfall in the central cereal growing areas at sowing time.
This commonly occurs in environments with alkaline soils and relatively low rainfall, including many of the cereal growing regions of southern Australia.
Some cases countries will need to switch the crops they produce as changes in temperature and rainfall patterns make some traditional cereals, fruits and vegetables unviable while others become possible.
You can integrate this with an empirical crop model, which is a complex mathematical model that lets you project the growth of cereals through different rainfall levels, and you can integrate this model with the agents behavior.
Much like, say, western Kansas today, the Khabur plains received enough annual rainfall — about seventeen inches — to support cereal crops, but not enough to grow much else.
Placing Kerkenes in its environmental and economic landscape suggests that farmers took advantage of favorable rainfall patterns to emphasize a preferred cereal crop, deploying new strategies to minimize local subsistence risk.
In spite of the province's dryness (about 16 to 20 inches [400 to 500 mm] annual rainfall), vegetables, including sugar beets, and cereals, especially barley, are cultivated.
Existing crop models were used to estimate the effect of projected changes in temperature, rainfall, and CO2 on future yields of grain, cereals, and soybeans (Parry et al. 1999).
