Widespread Flooding in Upper Midwest Decimates Farm Towns

Bob Hilt was in the fourth grade when his family’s farm, perched along the Big Sioux River in southeastern South Dakota, flooded in 1969. 

“I remember the National Guard trucks in the yard hauling furniture out of the house, and we just opened the gates and let the livestock go, and the whole farm was covered with water,” said Hilt, a retired police officer who only ended up farming part-time as an adult. “We had to take a boat in the road ditch to the school bus.”

Describing the flooding-induced destruction in the last week, including the death of a friend of his father’s just north of his town of Canton, Hilt became emotional.

“There’s people that are looking for livestock, there’s people that lost their livelihood for the season or last season, their crop is in a bin that water got into and ruined, their livestock feed for the year, their hay bales, it’s all gone,” he said. “My carpet’s just wet. Holy crap, that’s nothing.”

Heavy rain beginning June 20 has caused flooding in northern Iowa, southern Minnesota, eastern Nebraska, eastern South Dakota and Wisconsin. Over the three days from June 20 to June 22 alone, some areas of the Midwest received more than 18 inches of rain. In Iowa, rivers rose to higher levels than the infamous flood of 1993, which killed 50 people. That disaster was considered a 350-year flood, which would put the chances of it happening in any given year at 0.3 percent. As the climate changes, floods are becoming more and more common, making agriculture in farming towns here a more tenuous proposition.

On June 25, President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for several Iowa counties, allowing communities to secure federal funding for relief efforts. The floodwaters are now slowly receding, though the fear of unpredictable weather patterns remains among residents.

“It has been a strange year,” said Jared Bomgaars, a farmer who lives on about six and a half acres of land in Sioux County, Iowa. “We’ve had three years of drought, and now the last three years of rain have come just this spring. It has been wet constantly, and we’ve been on the edge of flooding many different times.”

Farming is a profession dictated by the weather. Every day, farmers like Joshua Manske, who runs crop operations in Iowa and Minnesota, plan their days around the forecast. At 11 p.m. a few weeks ago, Manske had a one-hour window to plant soybeans before it rained at midnight.

“The reason we were out there that late is because the next day there was a chance of rain coming, so we got the seeds in immediately,” Manske said.

Flooding can be catastrophic for farmers, most of whom plant monocrops on a large scale. Flooding depletes soil of oxygen and other key nutrients, and most corn can only survive two to four days of saturated soil. It is too late in the season now for most farmers to replant crops, especially because seeds need dry conditions when they are initially planted.

“A cattle farmer friend of mine said that when calving season comes, they want to keep the calf ‘high and dry.’ Well, that’s the same as when it comes to farming too,” Manske said. “You want to make sure that the seeds are in a nice, dry environment when they’re planted. If it’s cool and wet, it doesn’t bode well for that plant to start off on a very good foot.”

Silvia Secchi, a professor of geographical and sustainability sciences at the University of Iowa, explained that most farmers are incentivized to plant and use all their land—even if it is on the floodplain—due to crop insurance rules. While crop insurance protects what is in the fields, it does not protect anything off the fields. 

“Farmers that do not have insurance for stored crops might be in really bad trouble right now, because you can’t sell grain that has been in floodwater,” she said.

“We won’t know until that water goes down what it has done to those fields. It’ll cut asphalt, it’ll undermine roads, it’ll create its own path.”

While large-scale commodities like corn and soybeans blanket this part of the Midwest, livestock and concentrated animal feeding operations are big business here, too.

“Our neighbors have a decent-sized pasture that they rent out. One guy came on Friday before the heavy, heavy rain and got his horses out of there,” Bomgaars said. “All that grass is covered in dirt and silt, and you never know what else washed out on their fields. That grass is going to be washy for quite a while until it gets some sunlight and some fresh growth on it.”

The sheer amount of water dumped on this part of the country has many worried about what will be left behind.

“Water can cut through rock. It does amazing things,” Hilt said. “We won’t know until that water goes down what it has done to those fields. It’ll cut asphalt, it’ll undermine roads, it’ll create its own path.”

Secchi warns that the water is likely carrying more than just debris.

“The manure pits overflowing into water systems would be very bad,” Secchi said. On Wednesday, 17 manure pits reportedly overflowed in Minnesota. “There are things like pesticides and fertilizers in the water. That’s why flood waters are so dangerous.”

Despite these catastrophic climate events, including recent flooding that decimated millions of tons of soybeans in Brazil, most consumers are so detached from this part of the food system that they might not even see the effects at the grocery store. 

“Forty percent of the corn crop goes to ethanol, so that doesn’t impact food prices,” Secchi said. “It is possible that we will see some increases in the price of corn and soybean, but this will impact the price of things like beef, actually.”

Most of the food being grown in Iowa feeds cattle, pigs and chickens—not people. That’s why the most likely ripple effects at grocery stores nationwide, if there are any, will be price hikes for meat. But these climate events could foreshadow fractures in other states that grow food primarily for human consumption.

“These kinds of issues really show the lack of resilience in our food system. If something like this happens in California, we’re not going to have lettuce, we’re not going to have tomatoes, we’re not going to have carrots, we’re not going to have celery,” Secchi said. “This really shows that we need to diversify our agricultural system.”

As for farmers, prices for corn and beans have so far been slowly dropping since the beginning of June, and have dropped even further despite recent flooding. Values generally go up when supply is impacted.

“I think the markets have said the old adage of ‘rain makes grain,’ and even if there’s too much of it in some areas, there’s been adequate moisture to produce a big enough crop elsewhere,” Manske said. On Manske’s fields, for example, although the crop has been hit with a lot of rain, the fields seem to be performing pretty well. “Anything can change. You could have a hail event between now and the end of the growing season that can wipe you out if we continue to get these massive rains,” he said.

That’s a risk far more likely now than it was generations ago.

“In 2014 we had that once-in-a-thousand-year flood,” Hilt said. “Now here it is, almost to the day, only 10 years later.”