Larry Dallas’ farm in Central Illinois’ Douglas County is as flat as it gets. That’s a good thing for planting straight rows and maneuvering farm equipment in the field, but there’s a major downside, too.
“Heavier rain is hard for us to deal with because of the poorly drained soils and the lack of any roll to the ground. It's hard for the water to get away when the rain starts,” Dallas said. “We have installed a lot of drainage tile trying to mitigate that.”
But tile drains are no match for increasingly intense precipitation events. In the spring of 2019, for example, widespread flooding drenched the Midwest to devastating effect, causing record losses across the entire agricultural industry.
“2019 was a nightmare. We did everything in the mud and had a lot of crops drowning out,” Dallas recalled. “And on top of that, we didn't get a lot of sunlight that year and the corn was wet. The elevators got really behind, drying it.”
Field inundation is a real problem even in less catastrophic years, says Christy Gibson, an Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Crop Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Inundation impacts field workability, planting dates, erosion, and nutrient loss, but Gibson says inundation also causes widespread, systemic problems across the food system. These include economic issues, including more crop insurance claims, prevented planting, reduced profitability, sunk costs for suppliers, and lost sales for damaged or diseased grains, fruits, and vegetables. There are also biological changes, with inundation creating favorable conditions for pathogens and pests and altering soil microbial communities. Finally, Gibson points to human health impacts, such as heightened depression and anxiety in agricultural practitioners and potential disease transmission via contaminated water.
Click here to see more...