BERLIN, July 31 (Xinhua) -- Germany's warming climate is reshaping what farmers can grow, allowing watermelons and other heat-loving crops to take root in regions once considered too cool for commercial cultivation.
Yet the same climatic shifts are also putting established crops under mounting pressure. Longer growing seasons and more frequent droughts are prompting farmers to diversify production and rethink how they could manage climate risks.
NEW CROPS TAKE ROOT
Germany has traditionally relied heavily on imports from southern European countries such as Spain and Italy to meet its demand for watermelons. They are now, however, being cultivated in the country's northern regions.
In Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's northernmost state, Inga Kreutzfeldt has earned the nickname "Watermelon Queen." Since 2020, she has grown watermelons in Dithmarschen near the North Sea. The region has long been associated with cool-weather crops such as cabbage and is home to one of Europe's largest contiguous cabbage-growing areas.
"The watermelon is a diva," Kreutzfeldt said, noting that yields are highly dependent on the weather and difficult to predict. Even so, the crop proved surprisingly resilient during the drought of 2022, when rows without irrigation still performed well. "I know it sounds like an April Fool's joke, but the watermelon is a desert crop."
Watermelons have also found a place at Henrike Vorlop's family farm since 2020 in the northern state of Lower Saxony, where strawberries have long been the mainstay. Vorlop and her partner now harvest around 200 watermelons a week. "Thanks to the increasingly warm summers, watermelons are now growing well here," Vorlop said.
Warmer conditions, however, are putting some crops under strain. Preliminary data showed that Germany's open-field strawberry harvest is expected to fall 11.3 percent year-on-year to 71,300 tonnes in 2026, its lowest level since 1995. "Some farms were unable to finish picking their late-season strawberries because of the heat," said Christian Wach, a strawberry cultivation adviser.
LONGER GROWING SEASONS, DEEPENING DROUGHT
"Climate change is accelerating, more rapidly than many people realize," said Peter Zander, an agricultural engineer at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF). "Agriculture has to adapt. Growing seasons and dry periods are shifting, while weather conditions are becoming more extreme."
The changes are already measurable. Germany's average annual temperature rose by about 2.5 degrees Celsius between 1881 and 2025. In Schleswig-Holstein, state climate monitoring data show that the average growing season in 2015-2024 was more than 31 days longer than in 1951-1960, beginning 25 days earlier and ending six days later.
For farmers, the extended growing season creates new opportunities. It gives heat-loving crops more time to mature and, together with improved cultivation techniques, is making their commercial production increasingly viable in central and northern Germany.
But a longer growing season also means crops draw on soil moisture for a longer period. That demand, however, is becoming harder to meet as water availability comes under growing pressure in the country.
The Max Planck Society said higher surface temperatures and increased solar radiation have raised potential evaporation in Germany. As average precipitation has shown "no definitive trend," the country has become drier overall with more frequent droughts.
PUTTING EGGS IN DIFFERENT BASKETS
A study published by the University of Wuerzburg in March found that unchecked climate change could radically reshape German agriculture by the end of the century. By 2100, the low-lying river valleys of Franconia in southern Germany could experience climatic conditions similar to those now found in northern Italy's Po Valley and Gascony in southwestern France, potentially southern European crops to take root in the region.
Against that backdrop, farmers are beginning to reduce their dependence on any single crop. A recent ZALF study, based on simulations of nine arable farms in eastern Germany, found that farms with limited crop diversity were particularly vulnerable to climate-related yield losses and price volatility.
The researchers examined several diversification strategies, including broader crop rotations, dividing fields into smaller plots and growing different crops alongside one another in strips. Such approaches can spread risk across crops, allowing stronger harvests to offset losses when another crop performs poorly.
The study's diversification scenarios also included soybeans, a crop that is also gaining ground on German farms, due to their tolerance of drought and heat stress.
German farmers harvested around 131,000 tonnes of soybeans from 43,300 hectares in 2025, three times the volume recorded in 2016, according to the Federal Information Center for Agriculture (BZL). "Soy is one of the beneficiaries of climate change. It has a promising future," said Torsten Krawczyk, president of the Farmers' Association of Saxony. ■