by Julia Rendleman for ProPublica, Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, and Lylee Gibbs, Saluki Local Reporting Lab

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. A portion of the reporting in Alexander County is supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

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........

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