“Our corn should be chest high” said Chris Kurt, sweeping his arm across the brown field of limp green seedlings behind him. “And these soybeans were planted yesterday.” 

It was already late June, and Kurt, a fifth-generation farmer in northwestern Ohio, was one of the lucky ones. He’d managed to plant over half of his fields, while his neighbor, Jerry McGuire, planted less than a seventh of what he would usually grow. Glen Newcomer, another farmer in the region, only got a tenth of his acreage planted. All three producers are filing unprecedented claims with their crop insurance. They hope it will help them break even. 

“My dad used to worry about getting done, and I always told him there’d never be a year that we didn’t get it in the ground,” Kurt said, referring to the race to plant crops after the spring rains. “Well, this is the first year it’s happened.” 

According to the USDA, the cost of insuring crops against disasters like these will increase “as weather averages and extremes change over the coming decades.” Taxpayers spend $5 billion to $7 billion a year subsidizing crop insurance. By the USDA’s numbers, if farmers don’t adapt to climate change by changing when, where, and what they plant, the costs to taxpayers could increase as much as 22 percent by 2080.

This year is the first time that Kurt has filed for the most dire kind of crop losses: “prevented planting.” He’s not the only one. So far farmers in Ohio have filed claims for 1.5 million unplanted acres, according to Greg LaBarge, a field specialist with Ohio State University’s Department of Extension. It’s the most widespread prevented planting claim in Ohio’s history. 

The United States just ended its wettest year on record, rounding it out with the second-wettest month on record in May. This is a problem for farms across the Midwest, which take up 75 percent of arable land with corn and soybean crops. Northwest Ohio faced record-breaking rain events that, unfortunately, follow a statewide trend. 

Aaron Wilson, a climate scientist at Ohio State University (OSU), says weather like this year’s is likely to become the norm. Five out of the 10 wettest years in Ohio—dating back to 1895—have happened since 2005. Ohio has seen its planting and harvesting windows shrink by an average of 10 days over the last quarter century. The Fourth National Climate Assessment predicts heavy spring rains will continue to increase across the Midwest as the climate crisis becomes more dire. 

Those insurance claims won’t keep the local farming economy—and all the jobs that depend on it—from suffering. “It won’t make farmers thrive,” said Ty Higgins, spokesperson for the Ohio Farm Bureau, “but it will help them survive.” At least for some—over 20 percent of Ohio’s corn and soybean acreage isn’t covered by crop insurance. 

Higgins worries about the crops that did get planted too. He said the Ohio Farm Bureau, which keeps an eye on such things, has seen very low numbers of corn in excellent condition. Because it was planted so late, some crops will have roots that are too short to reach the lower water when the heat of mid-summer arrives. Crops planted in the quick window between heavy rains also face the risk of rot. If yields are low, farmers may file more insurance claims in the fall—this time for the crops that were planted as opposed to the ones that never made it into the ground.

Glen Newcomer, who is a crop insurance agent as well as a farmer, insures his crops at the highest rate available. But he will make less than 40 percent of what he expected to sell his crop for this year. And that 40 percent doesn’t include unexpected costs. Newcomer already invested in seeds, fertilizer, and equipment for the 5,700 acres he intended to plant, and he still has to pay rent for the three-quarters of his fields that he doesn’t own. He also has to maintain them—by weeding and planting a cover crop—to prevent erosion and keep the soil healthy. 

“It’s going to cost us more to give aid every time a disaster hits,” said Ben Lilliston, director of climate strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Lilliston sees this aid to farmers as important, but, he says “it needs to be coupled with a farm policy that tries to build climate resiliency on the farm.” 

Crop insurance was created as a land-diversion program. There are no requirements for how farmers use the land that hasn’t been planted on, and according to Ben Brown, an agricultural economist at OSU, “there’s no attention to environmental practices.” 

But there are plenty of ideas. For Aaron Wilson, innovations in water storage and land use practices like ditch building, tiling, no till, and planting cover crops could manage water more efficiently. Wilson thinks the continued development of hybrid crops—including more tolerance for heat, drought, and excess water—could also help. And, by the end of the 21st century, as the summers in Ohio begin to look more like the summers in Arkansas, more row crops like rice and cotton might begin to diversify Midwestern farm fields. 

“We’re going to have to learn to live with a lot more and a lot less water during extremes in the hydrological cycle,” Wilson said. “We want it to be environmentally sustainable, but it’s got to be economical for smaller farmers as well.” Still, some farmers hesitate when it comes to talking about climate change. Kurt has three sons, and he hopes one may take over the farm someday. He’s noticed that bad rainstorms occur more frequently than they used to, but he isn’t sure it’s attributed to climate change. Newcomer refers to this spring as a “once in a 100 year event.” 

McGuire has noticed that rainstorms have become less predictable and more powerful since he began farming in 1982, but he said he isn’t too worried by this, and doesn’t plan to change the crops he grows or the way he farms. That could change, though. If the same extreme rain events of this spring happen two years in a row, he said, “call me back and ask me then.”

For Lilliston, these 100 year floods are happening too frequently to be one-offs. “It’s not some future crisis down the road,” he said. “We’re already seeing the impacts.”