by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois, Julia Rendleman for ProPublica 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.

The seed tractor sank again, no surprise to Steve Williams. Everything sank out here on Dogtooth Bend in Southern Illinois since the floodwaters ran through five years earlier and dumped millions of tons of sand. The ground looked firm, but deep pockets of sticky mud lurked under the sun-cracked surface, pulling him under without warning.

He hit the gas. His wheels spun in place; sand flew. A few cuss words, too.

He called his daughter, Brandy Renshaw, working a nearby stretch of field in a giant green rig. She turned his way to pull him out; then she sank, too. Williams, in a faded plaid shirt, gray hair sprouting from under a John Deere hat, paced. Renshaw slammed the gearshift, rocked back and forth, and eventually clawed her way out.

It was June 2024, and both father and daughter knew the land they were trying to farm wasn’t going to yield much, even if they got the seeds in the ground. But this had become their routine: farming futile land just to keep from going under. For years now, they’d had one foot stuck in the mud, the other in government bureaucracy. They’d get angry — then laugh.

“What else could you do?” said Williams, 70. “We were left holding the bag.”

In these Mississippi River bottoms, federal farm policy became a trap. Farming is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in America. Each year, Congress allocates billions to keep crops in the ground, cushioning the blow from droughts, floods, fires and market swings — a safety net that dates to the 1930s, when the Depression and Dust Bowl put the nation’s food supply at risk.

But today, in some of the most flood- and drought-prone parts of the country, those programs can also keep people hanging on, even when it makes more sense to walk away. That’s increasingly clear along parts of the Mississippi River Valley and especially here in Alexander County, at the rural tip of Illinois. As the climate changes and as aging levees fail, the risk is becoming more predictable, the losses so frequent it is clear some land will no longer yield what it used to.

But the federal programs that support those changes — enacted first by President George H.W. Bush, then expanded by President Bill Clinton — have been small, slow and ineffective. After the 2019 flood — when the Mississippi River submerged the southernmost corner of Illinois for months, part of a widespread disaster across the Midwest — Congress allocated only about $217 million spread across 11 states to pay farmers to voluntarily retire their flood-ravaged fields.

Federal workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran the program, specifically urged farmers at Dogtooth Bend to sign up. The floods had come here repeatedly and had worsened since they busted through the 17-mile levee that protected Williams’ farmland three years earlier. So Williams signed up, along with about 30 others on Dogtooth Bend, finally ready to call mercy to the river. He offered up roughly 1,200 acres; the federal government offered to pay him about $3,200 an acre to put permanent easements on his land, which he could use for recreational purposes but never farm again.

At the time Williams applied, the program had been offered only one other time in the past decade to farmers along the Upper Mississippi River, despite billions in lost crops. And this time around, the pot — just 1% of the $19 billion disaster aid package — wasn’t big enough to help everyone who applied, especially along this corn- and soy-growing region. And even for those who were accepted, the agency in charge couldn’t keep up with the paperwork, making the process stretch on for years.

The process dragged through the rest of President Donald Trump’s first term and through most of President Joe Biden’s. And now these programs look even less certain as Trump and Republicans in Congress double down on the status quo: expanding crop insurance and farm income supports through the budget bill signed into law on July 4 while — in an effort to trim the federal workforce — gutting the staff responsible for responding to climate disasters, including those who manage permanent easements that pull troubled farmland out of production.

While farmers have struggled to access funds to help them get off flood-prone land, federal programs to keep their crops in the ground have long been the safer bet. Over the past three decades, Illinois has received........

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