After floodwaters ebb, food prices likely to rise

Dan Lundberg has struggled to get his crop into the ground because of the wet spring. He lives in Hull, Ill., a Mississippi River town (population 474) that was swamped in 1993 -- and where the waters are rising now. Most of his farmland has been far too wet to plant crops. What has taken root is tiny and growing sluggishly.

"I've got 500 acres I still can't get into yet, and it's already June," Lundberg said. "I'm going to have to leave it untilled and unplanted this year, and that is going to kill our family's savings this year."

Local schoolchildren have been spending the start of their summer vacation joining their parents filling sandbags and hauling them up to the barrier where sodden fields butt up against the man-made levees.

Most people are terrified that this will be a repeat of 1993: The town is eight miles from the river itself. All the farmland between the town and the river was flooded.

Even eight miles away, the flood swamped the town. Sam White, 69, a farmer and the mayor of Hull, said his house in town had 32 inches of water in it. White said many of the farmers in the area had been trying to plant corn -- and now, soybeans -- futilely all spring.

"We have farmers that have had to plant the same fields two, three, four times," White said. "Even before all this flooding, we can't get the crops in. The land's just too wet."

"You might as well laugh, because we're too tired and too anxious to cry," White said. "It's the talk of the town: If the floods don't get us, then will the lost crops do it?"

The floods also have disrupted the movement of goods across the heartland as roads and rail lines have been submerged. Union Pacific Corp. has closed off parts of the east-west main line across Iowa. Cresting floodwaters in nearby states have limited the railway's ability to reroute cargo. Union Pacific won't see the full extent of the damage to its tracks until the water recedes.

The storms have hit Iowa hard. Officials have declared 83 of its 99 counties disaster areas, and tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated from their homes.

Boland said the rains had been relentless. Last week, when he realized his farmland was about to flood, Boland raced to get his tractor out of the field. By the time he got there, he could see "my tractor in the middle of a lake, about 2 feet deep in water, mud and muck."

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jerry.hirsch@latimes.com

p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com

Huffstutter reported from Williamsburg, Iowa; Hirsch from Los Angeles.