Farmers across America are learning a harsh lesson: the climate crisis isn’t coming for their crops alone. It’s coming for every tick hiding in the grass.
Tick populations are surging as warming temperatures lengthen their active season, and farmers are bearing the brunt. One farmer in the Southeast now removes as many as 60 ticks from each of his working dogs daily—every single day from May through November. “It’s brutal out there,” he told Civil Eats. “You talk to other farmers, and they don’t talk about the weather anymore. They talk about how bad the ticks are that day.”
That shift in conversation matters. It signals a seismic change in what’s threatening the American farm.
Ticks thrive in warmth and humidity. As springs arrive earlier and falls stretch longer, the window for tick activity expands. Winters that once killed off seasonal populations no longer do. The parasites are spreading north, colonizing regions that were once too cold to support them. Livestock—cattle, sheep, goats, working dogs—face constant exposure. Ticks don’t just cause discomfort; they transmit disease. Anaplasmosis, Lyme disease, babesiosis: all of it hits the farm’s bottom line through veterinary costs, lost productivity, and animal illness.
For family farmers already squeezed by input costs and debt, tick management is another non-negotiable expense in an expanding list. Farmers can spray pasture, treat animals, rotate grazing lands—but they can’t stop the climate from warming. They can’t rebuild the winters that once held tick populations in check.
The tick surge is one more way that extractive capital and climate change are working in tandem to hollow out the farm. While agribusiness consolidates land and cuts corners on stewardship, rising temperatures are weaponizing the soil itself. Soil health and water systems that could buffer farms against pests are being degraded by industrial agriculture. And now, the warming climate is completing the circle: poisoning the ground in real time.
What can farmers do? Some are investing in rotational grazing and cover cropping—practices that boost soil biology and reduce tick habitat. But these approaches take time and upfront capital that most farmers don’t have. Precision agriculture tools and data platforms are starting to help farmers track pest emergence, but a tool that warns you about a problem you can’t afford to solve is no solution at all.
The tick crisis is a microcosm of the larger squeeze: climate change, corporate consolidation, and debt-driven decision-making are collapsing together on the American farm. The ticks aren’t the root problem. They’re a symptom of a system that prioritizes extraction over resilience—one that treats farming as a sacrifice zone rather than a livelihood worth protecting.
Until that changes, farmers will keep talking about ticks instead of weather. And the ticks will keep getting worse.
