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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.
Renshaw, left, and her father, Steve Williams, finish a day of planting soybeans this spring.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
An aerial image from November shows the damage to the Len Small Levee in Alexander County, Illinois. Without the levee intact, water flows onto the farms it was meant to protect.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
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 $35 billion in farm support — more than any state but Texas and Iowa — mostly through insurance subsidies and price supports for growing corn and soybeans. Some of that bounty is grown on flood-prone ground along the Mississippi and other river bottoms.
“At some point in time, don’t you ask yourself: Is this really economically the best way to spend our taxpayer dollars,” said Dave Hiatt, an easement coordinator and biologist with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, “or would it serve us better in the long run if we spent money to take that ground out of production?”
Hiatt is among the USDA employees on paid leave through September as part of the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the federal workforce.
ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois reached out to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service on Aug. 15 with a detailed list of questions about how it handled the Dogtooth Bend easements across multiple administrations as well as its priorities going forward. The agency said it was working on a response but did not provide it in time for publication or specify a day when it would respond.
While Williams waited for the buyout to go through, his bills didn’t stop. He still owed a mortgage to the bank, taxes to the county. That left him and Renshaw with a choice: Either do nothing and watch their farm operation go under, or do what they’d always done. Even when it didn’t make sense anymore, they had planted their fields to maintain their federally backed crop insurance. Keeping that crop insurance allowed them to access other agriculture subsidies and disaster aid.
So they mounted their tractors and rolled out to their nearly barren fields.
“You can’t afford to leave it,” Renshaw said. “So we planted what we could and insured everything we could. It was a nightmare.”
Renshaw posted on Instagram when her tractor was stuck in the mud in June 2024.
Credit:
Screenshots by ProPublica
It hadn’t always been like this. For decades, this Delta-like sliver of bottomland jutting into the Mississippi River at Illinois’ southern edge was “the garden spot of the county,” as Williams put it. He grew up farming alongside his dad and bought his first property on the peninsula in 1987.
At that point, the land on the flood-prone bend was still protected by the Len Small Levee, built in 1943 and named for an Illinois governor. The water broke through the first time in 1993, then again in 2011. But everyone recognized its days were numbered, and the state and federal government started paying people for their homes and businesses so they could move from harm’s way. That mitigated the risk, but it also meant that after floodwaters cut a nearly mile-wide hole in 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declined to cover the $16 million repair cost: With fewer people living there, the cost-benefit formula showed it wasn’t worth saving anymore.
Williams and the other farmers were devastated: When the levee was in place, Dogtooth Bend stayed relatively dry even when the Mississippi climbed well past flood stage — 33 feet at the nearby Thebes gauge. Since the breach, water spills into the peninsula every time the river nears that mark, and that happens often now, sometimes for weeks at a time.
As hopes of a levee repair fizzled, farmers were stranded. The federal easement program receives only sporadic funding, and typically only after a presidential disaster declaration, which Illinois didn’t get in 2016, despite widespread damage in Alexander County.
Predictably, Dogtooth Bend flooded again in 2017 and 2018.
Both years, from his office three hours away near Champaign, Hiatt and a small team of federal officials with the Natural Resources Conservation Service scrambled to come up with easement funds, even outside of a disaster declaration.
“We begged, we pleaded with headquarters,” Hiatt said. “We said, ‘We need these funds right now. These people have been this poorly impacted.’”
Flooding in Alexander County in 1993. The Len Small Levee breached for the first time that year, and again in 2011 and 2016.
Credit:
Courtesy of The Southern
Federal records show that after floods in both years, Hiatt and his colleagues in Illinois proposed buying out up to 11,500 acres owned by 40 or so landowners on Dogtooth Bend over time, starting with the most severely damaged. The first phase would cost $20 million and was projected to prevent $60 million in near-term damages. The proposal laid out a strong case: Roads were threatened; habitat was disappearing; land was becoming more and more degraded. Thousands of acres had already become unfarmable — and while the reports also weighed the option of restoring the land, they noted that the farmland would never be fully productive, and the costs to keep bailing out farmers would only grow.
By this point, Trump had taken office for the first time, bringing in new USDA leadership. In both 2017 and 2018, Hiatt said, agency leadership in Washington rejected the requests by him and his colleagues in Illinois to help move farmers off the land. This wasn’t unusual: According to one nonprofit’s report, over 25 years, 90% of landowners in the Upper Mississippi states who applied for funding were turned down.
Environmental groups support paying farmers to leave flood-prone land because floodwater that spreads across farm fields washes fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals into rivers, causing a range of down-river harms. But there’s an economic argument, too: A 2019 study in the science journal Nature Sustainability found that every $1 spent restoring floodplains by clearing them of development and farms can save at least $5 in future damages.
Despite this, the single largest agriculture program in the farm bill is intended to keep people on the land. That comes in the form of crop insurance premiums, an average of 60% of which are paid by the federal government.
In Alexander County, that is closer to 70%. More broadly, the costs of keeping people on their land there were spiraling upward: In addition to subsidies, there were millions more to clean up flood debris, shore up the levees, and fix roads and drainage systems. And still the floods kept coming.
Yet farmers were still planting. “They do the math,” said Silvia Secchi, a farm policy expert at the University of Iowa, about why farmers might keep investing in troubled land. “You and I would do the same math. If you want to stay in business, you do what makes you stay in business.”
For the father-daughter team of Williams and Renshaw, it was barely enough. “All the insurance did was keep people from going broke,” Williams said.
“You aren’t winning,” Renshaw added, “by any means.”
By the time the historic flood hit in 2019, the need to rescue the farmers at Dogtooth Bend was undeniable.
A house in Tamms that belonged to Brandy Renshaw’s uncle takes on floodwater in 2019.
Credit:
Courtesy of Brandy Renshaw
When the river finally pulled back, Williams no longer recognized the land he’d spent his life working. The levee breach had let the full force of the Mississippi pour through Dogtooth Bend for five months. It carved new channels, dumped dunes of sand and even sucked six barges off the main river and left two stranded in a field. People compared the scene to Mars. To the windswept dunes of “Lawrence of Arabia.” To Williams, it was “just a sickening feeling.”
Farmers in Alexander County claimed more than $7 million in crop insurance payouts that year — the highest on record. Roads were so mangled they had to be fully rebuilt. Trash and driftwood littered the peninsula. The damage made the case for a buyout harder to ignore.
If that case weren’t strong enough, the flood also put on display the benefits of letting the levee go. Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision not to fix it had hurt the nearby farmers, allowing the water to spread out in Dogtooth Bend may have helped relieve pressure on the levee system across the river in Missouri and downriver.
Williams and Renshaw had come to terms with what that meant. Their land had been sacrificed so others’ could be spared. When Williams signed up for the floodplain easement program in August 2019, he figured he’d never farm Dogtooth Bend again. By that point, only about 200 of their 1,200 acres could still grow a crop. “But do it right,” Renshaw said. Instead, they fell into a broken system that left them farming nearly useless land while they waited five years for the federal government to complete their easement paperwork.
Williams takes a call from Renshaw while he plants soybeans on his farm.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
A historic flood in 2019 broke through the Len Small Levee that protected Dogtooth Bend, sending six barges floating onto the land. Two remain in a field, seen here in November 2024.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
Piles of sand several feet deep remain on former farmland at Dogtooth Bend in May.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
Williams knew the government moved slowly, but his first year’s wait seemed absurd. By year two, he’d nearly given up. By the summer of 2024, he was just plain disgusted. He checked in regularly with federal workers, calling the local officials he knew by name on their cellphones or popping into the local office in nearby Tamms. But the federal workers on the ground couldn’t tell him much other than his paperwork was still in process, under review with a federal official somewhere in another state thousands of miles from Dogtooth Bend. They were frustrated, too.
Danette Cross, who worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Alexander County until her retirement late last year, said most of the farmers knew her by name and often called her directly, expecting she’d have answers. But to get anything resolved, Cross had to run questions up a chain through a half-dozen people. “I’m not going to say the whole thing was a disaster — they closed on a lot of easements,” she said, “but nothing was timely.”
Hiatt, who had failed twice before to bring in funds for these farmers, tried again in 2019, this time banking their hopes on the emergency aid Congress had earmarked for the program. Hiatt said the Illinois team requested $24 million to buy out everyone who signed up at Dogtooth Bend. The payments are not full market value but allow farmers to invest in drier fields that would be less costly to the federal government in the long run.
But headquarters authorized just under $6 million, which it applied to the very worst fields. Williams’ land was hit hard, but it didn’t make the cut. That meant crop insurance and the other safety net farm bill programs would have to sustain him while he waited.
This wasn’t the only holdup. In 2018, Hiatt said, the agency had created a national team to handle land deals in an effort to improve efficiency. But he said it backfired.
“We were acquiring easements in 500 days” when the Illinois office handled the process on its own, he said. “Now we’ve got this specialized team — they’re taking 800. The math is not working there.”
The head of USDA’s Risk Management Agency, which oversees the crop insurance program, made a personal visit to the wreckage after the floodwaters receded in 2019. Martin Barbre, who led the agency for most of Trump’s first term, knew the area well. He grew up visiting his relatives nearby and himself farms just 100 miles away. In a recent interview, Barbre said he empathized with the farmers and wanted to ensure they got everything they were legally owed through crop insurance.
“I mean, you’ve farmed that ground your whole life. Your family’s owned it for, you know, probably for generations, and here it’s just gone,” Barbre said. He didn’t fault the farmers who kept planting while they waited for a federal buyout. “As long as they’re insured, they have the legal right to do that,” he said. “When I was administrator, I had a saying: ‘I want a producer to get every dime he’s got coming from the program — but not a penny more.’”
In 2020, the USDA leadership released additional funding to purchase easements on Dogtooth Bend. Williams bounced between the two programs. Each required new paperwork — and more time.
In 2021, at a meeting in Olive Branch, Hiatt faced frustrated farmers. “I took a beating,” he said. “And I was glad to take it, because it was poorly administered.”
Three more years passed, and no check had arrived for Williams. But the bills still did.
Although it could barely grow a thing, the county still taxed Williams’ land on Dogtooth Bend like it was prime ground — nearly $40,000 a year, according to Williams, calculated in part on farm productivity from across the state. That number would rise in each subsequent year, including on fields buried under 20 feet of sand. That’s because the rate wouldn’t change until the buyout went through and it was officially classified as conservation land.
Deer dart across a field at Dogtooth Bend in May as a storm approaches. As farms are returned to wetlands, local wildlife may benefit.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
As one of the poorest and fastest-shrinking places in America, Alexander County — population 4,600 — leans on farmers like Williams to fund basic government services and keep teachers employed in a school district with just over 300 kids. Farming in Alexander County accounts for $1 in every $7 in the local economy. And as more people move out of the county, there are fewer left to shoulder the tax burden.
Sean Pecord, who farmed on Dogtooth Bend not far from Williams, was one of the first to sign up for the buyout program in 2019; his land was the worst hit. “There was nothing left of it to farm,” he said.
“They work at their own pace,” said Pecord, who along with his wife also runs the nearby Horseshoe Bar and Grill. “If they were operating on normal business terms, they’d be bankrupt in a year.”
Pecord received his payment in late 2023, about four years after he signed up. Williams was finally paid last September. “It’s not what they did,” Williams said of the federal government. “It’s how long they took to do it.”
G. Pang, who lives in nearby Missouri and owns land on Dogtooth Bend with her six siblings, said they’re still waiting to get paid — and for answers. She used to call Hiatt’s personal cellphone when she wanted a status update. But today, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has been hollowed out, with some 2,400 conservation staffers at home on paid leave through September under the terms of the federal buyout, according to a May report by Politico. Hiatt and his two federal colleagues who oversaw easement purchases in Illinois are among them, as are nearly half the staff of 30 who had been tasked with handling back-end easement paperwork as part of the agency’s national land team.
“Just going in there, taking a chainsaw, removing people and not knowing who you’re going to replace them with, you’re just creating a mess,” Pang said of staff cuts under Trump that have left her family in the dark.
Without the experienced staff, closing on these deals will take even longer, if it happens at all, Hiatt said.
“What’s happening now will never be reversed,” Hiatt said. “Once this is broken, which I don’t know if the break is complete yet, but it’s pretty fractured, I don’t think you can reset that bone.”
Several who joined the buyout were in their 70s and 80s. “They were devastated,” Renshaw recalled.
Williams’ health has deteriorated in the last few years. Macular degeneration has claimed much of his eyesight. Although he’s nearing retirement, he didn’t expect to go out like this.
Williams takes a lunch break with his family at his mother’s house on the farm in June.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
One of the advertised benefits of the buyout program was that he could take the money and use it to buy farmland elsewhere. But by the time he had his check in hand and was ready to close on new land this year in Alexander County, prices had soared. That means the amount of money he agreed to when he signed on can no longer buy what he’d planned to use it for.
Williams is locked in to the 2020 rate, which is 50% lower than the maximum the government is paying today. If Williams had entered the program today, his land would be worth roughly $2 million more than he agreed to take.
“We could take two acres of that money and buy us an acre up here,” he said. “Now,” he said, “it takes at least three acres of that money to buy an acre up here.”
Part of him regrets signing the papers. The other part knows he didn’t have a choice.
“That monster is still down there,” he said of the river. “It will be back.”
In May, Williams looks across the land he farmed until late last year at Dogtooth Bend.
Credit:
Julia Rendleman
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.
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.
