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Human responses to climate variation have a rich anthropological history. However, much less is known about how people living in small‐scale societies perceive climate change, and what climate data are useful in predicting food production at a scale that affects daily lives.

We use longitudinal ethnographic interviews and economic data to first ask what aspects of climate variation affect the agricultural cycle and food production for Yucatec Maya farmers. Sixty years of high‐resolution meteorological data and harvest assessments are then used to detect the scale at which climate data predict good and bad crop yields, and to analyze long‐term changes in climate variables critical to food production.

We find that (a) only local, daily precipitation closely fits the climate pattern described by farmers. Other temporal (annual and monthly) scales miss key information about what farmers find important to successful harvests; (b) at both community‐ and municipal‐levels, heavy late‐season rains associated with tropical storms have the greatest negative impact on crop yields; and (c) in contrast to long‐term patterns from regional and state data, local measures show an increase in rainfall during the late growing season, indicating that fine‐grained data are needed to make accurate inferences about climate trends.

Our findings highlight the importance to define climate variables at scales appropriate to human behavior. Course‐grained annual, monthly, national, and state‐level data tell us little about climate attributes pertinent to farmers and food production. However, high‐resolution daily, local precipitation data do capture how climate variation shapes food production.

Cesarean delivery is often epidemiologically associated with childhood obesity. However, little attention is paid to post‐birth modulatory environments, and most studies are conducted in settings where obesity arises for a number of reasons in addition to birth mode. We therefore assess population differences in the relationship between birth mode and childhood growth using data from rural and peri‐urban Latin American indigenous populations, and test predictions developed using life history theory.

Child height and weight were measured monthly in 80 Yucatec Maya and 58 Toba/Qom children aged 1‐48 months (2007‐2014, 3812 observations). Random‐effects linear mixed models were used to compare children's growth by population, sex, and birth mode, accounting for potential confounders.

Cesarean delivery rates were 47% (Toba/Qom) and 20% (Yucatec Maya). Childhood obesity and overweight rates were low in both populations. Cesarean‐delivered children had significantly greater weight gain (but similar height grain) compared to vaginally‐delivered children. By age 4, cesarean delivered Yucatec Maya girls and boys, and Toba/Qom boys (not girls), had significantly higher weight‐for‐age compared to vaginally‐delivered children from their own sex and population.

This provides one of the first attempts to document differences in children's growth patterns according to mode of birth in modernizing indigenous populations. Cesarean delivery is associated with young children's growth patterns, even in the absence of many obesity‐inducing factors. There are also population, age, and sex differences in the relationship between birth mode and childhood weight trajectories that warrant future investigation.