Jay Fischer is thankful his family's home is dry.
Not much else of his family's Fischer Farms across the Missouri River from Jefferson City is above water - it takes a boat ride of a mile and a half to get to their home.
"Everything that I farm is completely underwater," Fischer said Friday.
"I think we have maybe less than 50 acres that's outside of the floodplain is all that I can even drive across today," he added, and it's been that way for two weeks.
Many farmers in Missouri and the wider Midwest face a similar predicament.
"As far as I know, at this point, everybody from Boonville to Portland, anybody who farms in the river bottom would be in the same boat as myself," Fischer said, with numerous levees that have overtopped or been breached.
The longest-lasting - and still most uncertain - impacts of this year's major flooding may be on local and regional farmers, followed by the impacts on consumers of the crops and the animals that eat them.
In Missouri, as of the week ending June 2, 69 percent of the corn crop had been planted - compared to the 97 percent average planted by that date from 2014-18, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent crop progress report by the National Agriculture Statistics Survey.
Missouri is one of 18 states whose planted acreage of corn together grows 92 percent of the nation's crop, and several more of those states were even worse off, as of June 2: Wisconsin, 58 percent planted, compared to a five-year average of 91 percent; Illinois, 45 percent planted, compared to an average 98 percent; South Dakota, 44 percent planted, compared to a 96 percent average; Michigan, 42 percent planted, compared to an 87 percent average; Ohio, 33 percent planted, compared to a 90 percent average; and Indiana, 31 percent planted, compared to a 94 percent average.
Among the top 18 U.S. corn-producing states, 67 percent of the crop had been planted, as of June 2, compared to the five-year average of 96 percent.
"It will mean something, I just don't know how much," Blake Hurst said Friday of what effects those numbers will have for people shopping at grocery stores.
Hurst, a farmer from Westboro, is president of the Missouri Farm Bureau.
"Really, May 20 is (when) you start seeing some yield declines, and then it accelerates after about June 5," Hurst said of the rough cut-off date to plant corn expecting normal yields.
Figuring out what the numbers will mean for consumers down the line is difficult to estimate, he said: "You don't go the grocery store and buy a bushel of corn."
However, when the prices of corn and soybeans go up, "it becomes more expensive to feed chickens, pigs and cattle," and the price of meat goes up, he said.
"I can tell you what my crop looks like as of today; it can improve or deteriorate throughout the year, just depending on the weather," he said of what the snapshot USDA surveys can tell about the potential quality of a crop by harvest time.
"It looks like crap today, in case you're wondering," he said.
His soybeans, just emerging, look fine, he added.
"The corn is suffering from wet feet. What happens is that the soil is muddy and there's not any oxygen in it, and the corn roots are starved for oxygen, basically, and so the corn turns - they're not getting fertilized or they turn yellow," he said. "You can recover from that. What you can't recover from is lack of stands" - corn that was planted but didn't come up.
The USDA also tracks the percentage of a crop that's emerged - the percentage of the total acreage expected to be planted that's actually risen out of the ground.
In Missouri, as of June 2, 59 percent of the corn crop had emerged, compared to a five-year average of 93 percent.
"Normally, when you plant corn, most of it has emerged and come up fairly well. With all the rain, that's really been suppressed. And so we have a lot of really poor stands out there. We have probably some that didn't come up at all," said James Quinn, a field specialist in horticulture with the University of Missouri's Extension in Cole County.
"It's much worse than normal, and so, in addition to planting rates being way behind, what's come up is pretty pathetic compared to historical averages," Quinn said Friday.
Of the top 18 U.S. corn-producing states, only five - Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas - were less than 20 percent behind in the percent of their corn crops emerged, compared to the averages.
"If you planted today or later, you're looking at a 20 percent yield drop, if everything goes well," Hurst said of any corn planted at or beyond this point.
"Even the corn that was planted on time is behind because we haven't had enough heat," he said.
"We do have crop insurance, but a lot of our land was never planted, because we were never able to get on it this spring," Fischer said.
At the beginning of May, Fischer had hoped the Missouri River would drop to no more than 18 feet so his fields could dry out. At that point, he had planted about 140 acres of corn out of 800.
"I was trying to remain hopeful that we'd still be able to plant some beans in June," but the river's been too high for too long, and it's looking doubtful, Fischer said.
According to the USDA, Missouri's farmers and those of many other top soybean-producing states are also significantly behind in their planting of soybeans, as of June 2: Missouri, 18 percent planted, compared to a five-year average of 63 percent; with states including Ohio, Indiana and South Dakota being as bad or worse.
Among all 18 top U.S. soybean-producing states - that together grow 95 percent of the total crop in the country - 39 percent of the crop had been planted, compared to an average of 79 percent.
Soybean emergence numbers for Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin were all listed in single digits - South Dakota at 2 percent - against averages of about 50 percent.
Missouri had 12 percent soybean emergence, compared to a 47 percent average.
"We still have good prospects of a pretty good soybean crop. If we're planting today, I fully expect we'll get a pretty close to average yield from the soybeans, given normal weather conditions," Hurst said.
However, he said whether farmers plant soybeans - and the more acres planted, the lower the price will be - or take prevented planting depends on the details of federal government decisions involving trade mitigation and disaster-relief packages.
Hurst said many of the details of how federal programs will work are not clear yet; "We don't know the per acre payment. We're not really sure what acres are going to qualify for what program."
Taking prevented planting means taking the insurance payout for crops that could not be planted because of extreme weather.
Fischer said the payout for prevented planting is up to 50 percent less of what the normal crop would be worth - and having the insurance to begin with is more expensive for someone like him, who farms on land of lower elevation that's more at risk of flooding.
The trade-off is that his land is less susceptible to drought and other disasters, but the crop insurance is based on elevation.
"Farmers all over the Midwest should be, if they're not, in pretty close contact with their banker," Hurst said.
In addition to crop insurance, "If farmers have grain in inventory, which a lot of us do, the price has gone up, because we're going to have a short crop, and so that inventory's worth a little more. It's not all bad news, but, the financial pressure's already started, the worry about it, the concern about it," he said.
Fischer said "there's always a possibility" of planting wheat in the fall, once his fields dry out, but at this point, it would be about a year before that wheat crop would be close to being ready for harvest.
"I'm a real positive person," he said, trying not to paint too ugly of a picture.
He said he hasn't even thought ahead to what kind of help he might need or could get from the state or federal governments.
"I'm hoping that we can at least get the water to go down," assess the damage and get some help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or other federal help to get levee breaches fixed.
Without those holes in levees fixed, even fields that do dry out won't have any protection from future flooding.
USDA Crop Progress reports can be accessed at usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/8336h188j.
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