[AUDIO LOGO] My name is James Tucker.

I'm a sixth generation farmer from Willard, Missouri.

We raise corn and soybeans and wheat and put up some hay and run some beef cattle as well on our farm.

2025, in particular, has been probably the most dramatic, difficult time to raise crops in Southwest Missouri that I've experienced in my relatively young farming career.

What we're seeing generally, I would say, is longer periods of rain, longer periods of dry, longer periods of heat.

And 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, different things like that.

Climate change seems like it's making a bigger difference than it ever has before.

What we end up having later on in the year when the crops are maturing and filling is we have periods like we're having right now, which is extreme heat and longer periods of drought.

So you really need to get in early to try to get-- take advantage of those spring rains.

Then when you get all this moisture in April, you're delayed, and you have to get the crops out later.

And it just becomes more and more challenging to raise a good crop.

JACQUELYN WRAY: So the biggest things that affect agriculture right now are the extreme weather events that we have.

So there's more drought stress, more heat stress.

And more damaging is those late season freeze events.

And all of our plants are already coming out of their dormancy at that point.

So whenever that hits, it kills off a good portion.

JAMES TUCKER: These more extreme weather patterns we seem to get locked into.

Like once we get locked into one, it seems like it's harder to get out of it, and we can't seem to get, like, a nice balance of rain and sunshine and moderate temperatures.

It has definitely impacted our bottom line, because we've had these drought snaps late in the summer where we're trying to fill a soybean crop, or trying to fill a corn crop, or trying to plant corn in the spring and we can't get in the field because it's so wet.

A lot of people think like, you can't have too much rain, but it's not true.

[CHUCKLES] There's-- there's kind of an old saying in farming that is, farmers spend half the time wishing it would rain, and the other half wishing it would stop raining, which is really true.

We're trying to stay on the edge of the-- the latest hybrids that have been bred, with climate change in mind, that are going to be more resilient during longer periods of dry and heat and the same thing with longer periods of wetness.

For the last two or three years, it's been really tough to raise a good soybean crop, which has been historically about like half of what we grow.

When you have a very limited window of opportunity and you have periods of rain and rain and rain for weeks at a time, you're going to have more problems with weeds.

You're going to have fertilizer leaching out of the soil.

And it's ultimately going to become more expensive to-- to grow a good crop.

It takes a while for farmers to get on board with climate change largely because it becomes such a politicized issue.

It's hard to deny reality.

You know, you talk about the record rainfall we had this spring and-- and the dry we're having now, it becomes so evident to people.

And the reality is farmers know what's going on with the weather just about better than anybody, and they're going to be able to see the patterns that are developing.

I've long kind of accepted that this is something we're going to have to deal with and that climate change is 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.

And it's going to be more like, how do you adapt to survive these dramatic swings in the weather?