[AUDIO LOGO] JESSE CARROLL: The Missouri State Fruit Experiment Station was actually established in 1900 as an act of legislature by the state.

It was gifted to MSU.

And then since then, we've used it to do research in small fruits.

So that includes grapes, tree fruits, blackberries, blueberries, all of the above.

It kind of serves as our home base for horticulture production.

Our research directly affects growers, and we go to conferences and we deliver our results.

And they're able to take what we have here and make decisions in their own vineyards and wineries.

We have research on the disease side.

We're studying the mechanisms at a molecular level.

We have genetics and breeding.

We're looking for desistance and susceptibility genes, cold hardiness traits that we can then turn into breeding cultivars that are more hardy for this.

The disease pressure is higher tire because the conditions are right for it.

It's hotter, it's wetter, it's-- More humid.

--more humid, yeah.

JESSE CARROLL: So there's a number of different ways that you can try to prevent or mitigate the damage that we see from heat stress, cold damage, water stress.

All of those things, though, require more inputs.

You can use evaporative cooling.

So sprinklers run every 15 minutes throughout the day above a certain threshold temperature.

And that cools the fruit and cools the plant.

But that requires more water input.

So there are a number of different management things that we can do to mitigate these issues.

But again, all of those will need to be researched, and we have to assess their effect as well as the cost on both our resources-- our money and our time-- and how all of that plays into what the future is going to look like in our production.

A research setting is vastly different than oftentimes what growers can do.

So part of what my research focuses on is the practicality of that.

Like, yes, we can do deficit irrigation, or yes, 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?

So while we know that those are strategies we can use to mitigate these climate change effects, we're seeing they're not feasible for growers to implement.

And so part of our research then assesses, OK, how can we make this a thing that growers can do without costing more or meeting them where they're at?

We're definitely not climate scientists or climatologists.

That's true.

But we do see the impact of it real time out here in the field, and we are facing challenge after challenge every growing season.

JACQUELYN WRAY: Funding for research like this is extremely important because how will they know how to adapt if we're not doing the research.

It's not going to get done, and we're not going to be adaptable.