Most of us have some things we are passionate about. Sometimes we are fortunate to find a way to make these things “what we do” for our work and our pleasure.

I realized recently when going through some old family photo albums that I share some with my favorite passions with my long-deceased grandfather.

A wounded World War I veteran whose family emigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 1800s, he was a serious man on most occasions. He worked as a senior product engineer for a major building materials manufacturer for most of his career, but rarely talked about that. What he did happily share with our family was a small farm (with a bare-bones cabin for weekend living) along a small river in what has now become suburban New Jersey. He grew strawberries and enlisted the grandchildren as often as possible to come pick and pack berries and swim in the stream when the day was done.

He had one other passion that I was only to learn about later in life. In the 1930s, when he could scrape together enough to buy the gasoline, he would take his friends (and occasionally my father) on a three-day drive to Carrabasset, Maine. Turns out they were avid fly fishermen who loved to fish all day, hang out in a tiny cabin and tell stories.

And, it turns out, both of these interests of my grandfather became mine as well.

Of the two, the one that has absorbed more of my life has been farming and growing plants. As a little kid, my parents gave me a small part of the back yard to plant my own garden. It was never much to brag about, but it inspired what has become a lifelong interest in not only growing things (from houseplants and vegetables to trees for lumber) but in understanding the science of it all.

For a long time I guess I was one of those geeks who would rather read a book on meteorology than go to a movie. I got passionate about the environmental crises of the 1970s, and I’m sure some called me obsessive about reading about the science of it. My wife chuckles and wonders how I remember all that science trivia but can’t remember where I left my car keys.

So farming was simply something I guess I needed to do.

More than 35 years ago, as newlyweds, my wife and I bought a piece of land in Weare, largely because it had a nice field of high-quality farm soil. We were going to make a go of being part-time farmers. Ten years later, after growing organic vegetables and flowers along with two small children, it became clear that we were good at the growing part but the profits were too small for a growing family. After taking a full-time job in Concord, the farm was converted to growing Christmas trees, which are still a lot of work but don’t demand the constant attention and intense marketing of growing vegetables.

In the past 30 years, I’ve learned a lot about growing conifers – lots of it from seminars, publications, other growers and personal experience. The scientist in me is always experimenting with ways to manage bugs and diseases, and discover what species of firs and spruces do well on our soils and in our climate.

It’s been a successful enterprise in many ways. But today I find myself pondering some challenges I never anticipated.

The 2016-17 drought has been a game-changer. We’ve had droughts before, but not like this one. We lost about a third of all the new trees we planted last spring, despite carting water to them an unprecedented number of times. Some growers lost all the trees planted in 2016. Several trees that were ready for harvest this past Christmas mysteriously lost nearly all their needles in April, a phenomenon that had never occurred before. Perhaps it was the same weird spring temperature swings that killed off the flowers on our fruit trees, resulting in no peaches and no apples for the first time in 36 years.

Another new job that has consumed more and more time is controlling poison ivy. When I was a kid at my parents’ summer cottage in Gilmanton, I never saw poison ivy. I knew what is was from the lush growth just behind our house in New Jersey but was delighted not to see it in New Hampshire because I’m severely allergic.

When we bought the farm in Weare, I noticed a tiny bit of it in the neighbor’s orchard. There was none on our property. Since then it has invaded our entire neighborhood and now I have to regularly spend hours mowing it, cutting it down and (unfortunately) spraying it. It wouldn’t do to have customers cut down their Christmas tree only to find a day later that it resulted in contracting a case of poison ivy just in time for the holidays.

I know the difference between climate and weather and that we have always had extreme and unusual weather events that can wreak havoc with farmers’ best laid plans. But in recent years, just as the climate scientists have been predicting, these events are happening more frequently. And I‘ve learned that a major contributor to the rampant spread of poison ivy (and other invasive vines) is the unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere created by human activity.

Researchers have demonstrated that vines like poison ivy grow faster and faster as CO2 levels increase, overtaking the growth rates of the competing surrounding vegetation.

I actually wish climate change wasn’t real. I’d rather know that the problems I face on our farm are still mostly within my own resources and ingenuity to solve. But after many years of looking into the science of climate and weather (much of it courtesy of the extraordinary research at UNH), I know that climate disruption, as I prefer to call it, is real.

Climate disruption is making the future of my farm look different than I’d imagined. Will the species of trees I grow be able to survive longer droughts, longer heat waves and shorter winters? This question is important when you grow a crop that takes 10 or more years from seed to harvest. Will the forest I’ve carefully tended for decades regrow native trees or more exotic invasives? The list of questions is very long.

I’ve done a lot to reduce our own carbon footprint and now I’m looking for our leaders to do what’s necessary to address the issue before it’s too late. You can probably guess that at this point in time I’m not particularly optimistic they will.

(Paul Doscher lives in Weare.)