Farmers know climate change is real.

Craig Dunnum didn’t read the recently released National Climate Assessment which predicts the nation’s farm commodity contribution to the economy—$136.7 billion in 2016, already low due to falling prices—will be increasingly vulnerable to droughts, floods, pests, and disease. Instead, he lived it.The fourth-generation farmer in south-central Wisconsin has been through four 100-year floods in the past eight years. This year was the worst ever, with 20 inches of rain in 10 days. Two dams broke, flooding the small farming community nearby with eight feet of water. Corn and hay fields were wiped out; cattle were killed. “Farmers around here are generally of Scandinavian descent,” he says. “We don’t ask for help, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”Two decades ago, Dunnum, like many farmers, scoffed at global warming. “I didn’t take [climate change] seriously,” he recalls. Now, he says “Everybody buys into the fact that things have changed, we’re just not sure what we can do about it.”