How an Illinois Farmer Turned Flooded Farmland Into Rice Paddies — ProPublica

On a late July morning, Blake Gerard zips across his Southern Illinois rice farm on a four-wheeler, wearing his usual USA Rice shirt and shorts that hit above the knee. It’s the only rice farm in Illinois, a place where rice never grew before.

He carries rubber hip boots in his truck for when he needs to wade into the water to check or change its depth. The young rice has entered a crucial stage; it has taken root but is still tender and needs a shallow, steady blanket of water, which Gerard maintains with a system of cascading fields surrounded by levees and pumps. Two to 4 inches of water is ideal.

For the parts of the fields he can’t reach in his truck, a drone does the seeing. This morning, it catches a patch where the water pools too deep, and he turns on a pump, moving water into a drainage ditch that flows into the nearby Mississippi River. “That whole corner would’ve gone under if I hadn’t seen it,” Gerard says.

This daily scramble across 2,500 acres of flat, muddy bottomlands is now routine for one of America’s northernmost commercial rice farmers. But it wasn’t always. Gerard’s story is both proof that change and innovation in farming are possible and evidence of how hard they are — and why so few have tried. The transition took decades. It was also expensive and largely unsupported by federal farm policy, which is heavily focused on corn and soybeans.

Corn, soy and wheat were the crops Gerard, now 55, was growing in the early 1990s when he took over his family farm near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. By then, the floods were already coming more often. Gerard’s grandfather remembered them in 1943 and 1973, but as Gerard began farming, they came every two years — in ’93, ’95 and ’97.

According to the latest National Climate Assessment, annual precipitation in the Midwest increased in some places by as much as 15% between 1992 and 2001. Importantly for farmers, the amount of precipitation on the days with the most rain has increased by 45% over the past 50 years.

“The most extreme heavy precipitation is increasing at a far faster rate than overall total seasonal or annual precipitation,” explained Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist. That increased intensity “has been a faster and larger change, and that has caused more impacts due to flooding and erosion.”

For Gerard, a fourth-generation crop farmer, only in his 20s, working the fields of the Mississippi River bottomlands in Alexander County, Illinois, there was no sense in fighting the water anymore.

“I could grow something that would grow in water,” he said. Or quit.

Climate change is shifting where rice can grow. Long considered a southern crop, it has crept north through the Missouri Bootheel, and with Gerard’s expanded operation, now has a foothold in Southern Illinois. It’s a crop that can thrive where others can’t, like along the riverbanks of flood-prone Alexander County.

But for many farmers, making the transition to a new crop is nearly impossible, as ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reported this week. Although rice is a commodity crop and Gerard receives insurance subsidies and commodity supports, corn and soybeans dominate U.S. agriculture, especially in the Midwest, and that’s what federal subsidies are set up to support.

Federally backed insurance for those crops cushions the risk of climate change for growers, even in floodplains; ethanol policy props up demand; and the entire infrastructure — from grain bins to rail lines to river barges — helps move corn and soy from fields to market to overseas. Illinois is the second-largest corn exporter in the nation.

There’s also culture: Farmers tend to grow what their parents and grandparents did. Even the local experts — the folks at the nearby Farm Bureau offices and university extension programs — are largely trained in what’s always been done.

“Everything’s stacked against it,” said Jonathan Coppess, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official and current farm policy expert at the University of Illinois. “Nobody says no, but the system doesn’t know how to say yes.”

And federal policy is moving deeper in that direction. President Donald Trump has scrubbed climate language from farm programs. Although the “Big, Beautiful Bill” signed in July provides additional funding for programs that could help with crop diversification, it largely reinforces the idea that crops should stay where they’ve always been.

ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois sought comment from the USDA on Aug. 20 about how it is responding to climate change and crop diversification. An agency spokesperson said the USDA was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.

This stretch of the country where Gerard did the seemingly impossible is an important testing ground. But it wasn’t easy. There were no mills to process what he grew, no market to sell it into, no roadmap to follow. Ultimately, it took 25 years and millions of dollars to make it work. Gerard shows what is possible, but also how improbable it is for the Corn Belt to diversify without the sustained effort of federal policy.

In 1943, when the Mississippi tore away from its banks and charted a fierce and muddy course across America’s central farmlands, Gerard’s grandfather, Harold Gerard, had already fled the waters once.

He had been living on a tiny island in the middle of the river just north of Cairo, Illinois. Seeking dry land that would be amenable to the wheat, alfalfa, corn and cotton he was accustomed to growing, he moved his family about 30 miles north.

But even there, the water kept rising. Blake’s father took over the farm and put in a pump on his lowest field to take water away from the corn, but the water kept coming up.

“The water comes from under the ground here,” Blake Gerard said.

He was studying at Mississippi State when his father died in August 1990. Overwhelmed, he left school, came home and harvested the final crop his father had planted. But with floods coming more frequently, he worried that the government would get out of the crop insurance business, which helped keep him afloat. He briefly considered fish farming but worried about floods there too. Ultimately, Gerard realized he needed a crop that loved the thick, muddy ground he calls “gumbo.”

Around that time, farm policy was changing: In 1996, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act — known as the “Freedom to Farm Act” — gave farmers flexibility in crop choice.

He looked south, to Arkansas and Missouri, for guidance, driving around, knocking on doors and asking farmers about a crop that wasn’t afraid of the water.

At one farm in the Missouri Bootheel, an older man listened to Gerard’s questions for an hour, then said, “You know what? I met your dad. You’re a lot like your dad. He came down here in the ’70s asking me the same questions.”

Gerard hadn’t known about his father’s early interest. But it led them both to the same place, where he found his answer: “I’ve got rice ground.”

In 1999, Gerard planted his first 40 acres of rice. The next season, he tripled his acreage. After that, Gerard started converting his fields “like crazy.” There were no government programs to help pay for the transition, and it was expensive.

The big effort was grading the land: flattening it and building embankments so water would cascade from one field into the next. At $1,000 per acre, Gerard would invest millions into turning his ground from soy to rice.

Gerard realizes the investment was one he could only have made when he was still young and unafraid of debt. “I had time to get it all paid for, but if you’re my age now, mid-50s, why do I want to borrow a quarter of a million dollars to do this and make all these changes and create more work for myself? It’s more work. Rice farming is way more work. Double, triple the work that corn and beans are.”

Gerard also had to invest heavily in farm equipment. He rattles off a list: power units, fuel tanks, turbines, pipes, the water control structures, and on and on. Gerard scratches his head when asked about his total investment — it’s too much to remember and too hard to keep track of, he said. What he knew for certain was that he was going to commit to rice.

This year, Gerard’s farm finally got some help: a Climate-Smart Commodities grant that would allow him to invest in things like soil moisture meters, pump automation and water monitors. Then in April, he received more news: The funding, considered a “climate” program, had been canceled by the Trump administration. Then in May, he was told the funding was back — under a different name.

But around the state, conditions for farming this year have continued to deteriorate. In May, the National Weather Service issued a dust storm warning for the first time ever for the city of Chicago. High winds brought loose topsoil across the state and into the city, limiting visibility and shocking meteorologists who had not documented a weather event of this kind in the city since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Researchers believe that the corn and soybean rotation that dominates Midwestern farming is at least partially to blame — replacing the grasses that gave the Prairie State its nickname with crop rotations that don’t hold the soil in place, and a steady stream of fertilizers and pesticides doesn’t help.

The dominance of soy and corn, with little variation, could have “possible long-term impacts” on “economic returns, communities, and the environment,” according to the website for Diverse Corn Belt, a USDA-funded project of researchers and scientists who collaborate with government agencies, farmers and conservation groups. They want to find ways to give farmers more crop options.

That’s especially pressing in places like Alexander County, a corner of the country that bridges different farming regions. “It’s one of the most difficult places to understand in U.S. agriculture,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor at the University of Iowa, who studies farm policy and is an investigator with Diverse Corn Belt. “But the system isn’t built for a place like this. The system is built for: you’re in Nebraska, you raise cattle; you’re in Iowa, you grow corn. All these places that are kind of funky at the margin — we don’t make policy for them.”

Diversifying crop rotations would help in the Midwest, but also in places with other climate-related woes, like increasingly dry Texas and storm-wracked Louisiana. Making such changes is not impossible, said Louisiana State University researcher Herry Utomo, who developed the rice strain grown by Gerard. Climate change is “coming anyway, so we have to be positive and respond to it appropriately,” he said. “With good planning, anticipation and understanding of the rate of change, we can respond.”

But Coppess, a former USDA official, said farm policy has never been great at planning for climate change.

“There’s nothing in farm policy that takes into account climate change. In fact, most arguments would be that it’s at best neutral and at worst counterproductive for climate change,” Coppess said.

And under Trump, research universities are losing funding and climate initiatives are being decimated.

For Gerard, his willingness to risk everything paid off. He had a banner year in 2024 — his most successful rice-farming year to date. He no longer wonders whether the “big river” or a deluge will take out his crop. While a range of factors — from weather to international markets — affect whether he makes money, his shift to rice has taken production volatility out of the equation and he rests easier.

He remembers one of his first harvests, late in the growing season, when the mature stalks of rice had begun to bend toward the ground under the weight of their own grain.

One farmer, he recalled, pulled over and laughed at the drooping stalks. To him, the field looked ruined — nothing like the stiff, proud stalks of wheat growing nearby.

“People said you can’t grow rice here,” Gerard said. “I had the crop growing in the field and they’re like, ‘You can’t grow rice, we’re in Illinois, they grow rice in Louisiana.’”

That was a quarter-century ago.