James Tucker is a sixth-generation farmer from Willard, Missouri. He raises corn, soybeans and wheat as well as beef cattle. He said 2025 has been one of the most difficult times in his career to raise crops in southwest Missouri. He said the effects of climate change are undeniable.
He is seeing “longer periods of rain, longer periods of dry, longer periods of heat.” And, he added, “it seems like what we're really having is an imbalance in the weather patterns, which is making it much more difficult to get in the field in a timely manner, to plant, to cultivate, to spray, to harvest.”
He explained that the weather in southwest Missouri is already known as variable but is just getting worse.
“We had the wettest April we've had on record this year,” Tucker explained, and he said prior to April, “from January, February to March, we had probably the driest year we've ever had.”
Tucker said too much rain and flooding in April makes it hard to get crops out in time to take advantage of spring rain, and long, hot dry periods in late summer mean that crops dry out and get no chance to catch up. It is expensive to add irrigation or afford new hybrid seeds developed to keep up with changing weather conditions, and everything about the current economy makes it hard for a grower to switch crops. Corn and soybeans have been staples of Midwest agriculture for decades. He said farmers must be careful about investments in new methods and technology, but water infrastructure is likely the next investment he’ll make. As he looks at market prices, he also said he may raise more beef cattle next year. He is also looking at how he uses fertilizer and cover crops.
“We've tried to adjust and apply fertilizer in a much more strategic manner,” he said, explaining that flooding from heavy rains can wash it away when it’s applied in more traditional methods. “And another thing that helps with that is the cover crop, because it's going to soak up some of the moisture and give some residue on top of the ground to hopefully keep the fertilizer in place.”
Those are just a few of the issues he faces and solutions he is working with on his farm.
Jacquelyn Wray and Dr. Jesse Carroll work at the Missouri State University Fruit Experiment Station in Mountain Grove. As our weather becomes more volatile, they're part of a team researching fruit and tree plant varietals and growing conditions and strategies to help farmers and growers like Tucker better understand what they can do to mitigate their risks.
“The biggest things that affect agriculture right now are the extreme weather events that we have.” Wray said. “There's more drought stress, more heat stress.”
And, Wray said late season freezes that might hit in early spring are particularly damaging for the plants they study.
“All of our plants are already coming out of their dormancy at that point. So, whenever that hits, it kills off a good portion.”
Wray also said that environmental stressors, including heat and humidity, increase risks of plant diseases. She said staff at the Experiment Station are doing research into diseases. “We're studying the mechanisms at a molecular level,” Wray said. “we're looking for resistance and susceptibility genes, cold hardiness traits, that we can then turn into, breeding cultivars that are more hardy.”
Dr. Carroll said his research focuses on the practicality of mitigation solutions.
“We can do deficit irrigation,” he explained, “or we can do evaporative cooling, but how easy and how cost effective is it for the growers to implement those, especially here in the Midwest? They're not working with nearly the size or the profit margins that larger scale fruit production is working with. And so oftentimes things like smudge pots for freeze protection or evaporative cooling is not cost effective for these growers.”
Carroll said, “while we know that those are strategies we can use to mitigate these climate change effects we're seeing, they're not feasible for the growers to implement. And so, part of our research then assesses, okay, how can we make this a thing that growers can do?"
He pointed out that he and his fellow researchers are not climate scientists, but they “do see the impact of it real time” in the field, he said, and are “facing challenge after challenge, every growing season.”
Wray, Carrol and James Tucker all say the same thing: When it comes to agriculture, adaptation is key.
“Funding for research like this is extremely important because how will they know how to adapt if we're not doing the research?” Wray explained, “if we don't have funding…then it's not going to get done, and we're not going to be adaptable.”
James Tucker said he has long accepted climate change as a reality.
“I'm kind of like losing hope that something is really going to be done in the near future to alleviate the problem, let alone solve the problem," he said. "And it's going to be kind of more like, how do you adapt to survive these dramatic swings in the weather?”