URBANA, Ill. (U.S.A.) — 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.

Given these impacts, Gibson and a team of her U. of I. colleagues are sounding the alarm on field inundation and encouraging fellow researchers to dig into the issue.

“Everyone seems to be interested in drought and investing resources in breeding for drought tolerance. That’s important, of course. But fewer people in the research community seem to notice that intermittent flooding is a problem throughout the Midwest, and that it impacts everything from crop profitability to soil health to farmer mental health,” Gibson said. “We have to look at this.”

The team recently published an article in Global Change Biology discussing the issue and drawing up a research agenda. The paper points out that although certain best management practices, such as cover cropping and conservation tillage, are thought to help with field inundation, few farm-scale studies have proven their effectiveness.

That’s why Gibson and her colleagues are looking to include working farms in their studies. They’re collaborating with farmers like Dallas, where they’ve already installed instruments to establish baseline and long-term measurements of soil parameters and other factors. Then, following a heavy precipitation event, their rapid response team will deploy to learn how conditions change and over what timeframe.

Gibson’s co-author Esther Ngumbi, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology at Illinois, says this rapid response approach in collaboration with working farms fits right in with new USDA funding priorities for emerging issues in agriculture, including weather events.

“The funding agencies are realizing that it will take funding specifically tailored at these more unpredictable problems in real time,” Ngumbi said. “We need that support to get out, get the data sets, and report back what we have found.”

The project leaders hope to recruit researcher-farmer teams across the Midwest to study how well best management practices mitigate field inundation. Ultimately, they want to learn enough to create a customizable toolbox of solutions suited to specific contexts.

“No two landscapes are identical. What works for a farmer in Gifford won't work for a farmer 30 miles away in Tuscola,” Gibson said. “In order to create and deliver tailored toolboxes to stakeholders, we have to monitor what’s going on now and try new solutions to see what else might work.”

She adds that although researchers might be the ones crunching the numbers, they can’t build meaningful tools without the full participation of farmers and other agricultural practitioners.

“I'm very much a believer in the co-production of knowledge and solutions. We're a land-grant institution with a strong Extension program. We have to constantly collaborate with our stakeholders and those who invest in what we do — that’s every taxpayer,” Gibson said. “We have to make sure that whatever we're putting out actually works for our stakeholders, whether that’s commodity groups, seed producers, fertilizer companies; really, everyone who contributes to our food system.”

Frank Rademacher, who farms in Gifford, Illinois, and has opened up his farm to Gibson and the team, says collaborating with researchers benefits both parties.

“Partnering with researchers is a two-way street. It’s incredibly important for them to conduct research in real-world conditions, across a spectrum of management practices, climates, soils, etc.,” he said. “And we get exposed to the latest research and get to share practical experiences with the team. It’s a win-win.”

The research team is always looking to network with farmers and other stakeholders who are experiencing the impacts of flooding and other severe weather. They’d like to hear what farmers have done to mitigate adverse effects, and if these practices are keeping pace with intensifying severe weather. To learn more about partnering with the research team, contact Christy Gibson at deltac13@illinois.edu.

The study, “Keeping Pace With Intensifying Agricultural Field Inundation Events: A Framework for Testing the Mitigative Capacity of Current Best Management Practices,” is published in Global Change Biology [DOI: 10.1111/gcb.70842].

Research in the College of ACES is made possible in part by Hatch funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.