Senate Republicans are sending farm country into the Super El Niño with the fields bare.
The UN weather office says this is the strongest El Niño in seventy years, set to carry into 2027, and the World Meteorological Organization expects it to intensify through the winter. The heaviest rains are forecast across the southern half of the country. Up here, the question isn’t which storm finds us. The question is what the ground is holding when the rain comes.
Last week I drove County Z out past the old Leola ditch. The corn was off, and the field across from the treeline was bare as a parking lot, with standing water in the wheel tracks from a rain two days earlier. That field sits in the sand country Leopold wrote about — the flat, sandy ground that covers this end of the state, ground that drinks what you give it to hold and sheds the rest toward the Wisconsin River. Water doesn’t stand on this soil unless nothing is left to soak it in.
Down at the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department office on Main Street, the staff who write the practice plans for holding this county’s soil have a waiting list of farmers ready to go on cover-crop seed and interseeding cost-share. They can do the field work, the soil tests, the paperwork. What they can’t do is print the money. The Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program — the two workhorse pots that pay for winter roots — are exactly the programs Senate Republicans have insisted on cutting in the stalled farm bill. Every name on that waiting list is a field that stays bare when the snow melts.
The numbers on what winter roots do are not exotic. Researchers Andrea Basche and Marcia DeLonge found that keeping plants in the ground year-round opens the space between soil particles by eight percent — a small-sounding change that puts sixteen percent more water into the crop’s reach during drought. When the heavy rain comes, those same roots lift infiltration by thirty-five percent under a cover crop and fifty-nine percent under perennials: enough, in most cases, to soak up the one-inch-per-hour storm that would otherwise peel the field into the ditch.
Basche and DeLonge ran the arithmetic for one state — a third of Iowa’s cropland in winter cover, and runoff and flood peaks drop by a fifth in the wet years. You can run the same pencil across this county. Winter roots on the row-crop ground up and down the Wisconsin River would take the edge off every spring rise, which means less water surging into Petenwell and Castle Rock, which means the lake homeowners and the walleye and the main drag in Friendship all come out ahead. We spent a century trying to drain this country — the Leola Ditch was the grand project of it, forty miles of ditches that dried the peat and burned the muck, and the water ran off anyway. The fix was never more ditches. The fix is roots.
So why isn’t every winter field green? Because the insurance system pays for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton, and pays generously enough that a farmer can lose the whole harvest and still get a check. Plant hazelnuts or elderberries instead and the Whole Farm Revenue Protection program leaves you to fend for yourself — the industry itself calls it inadequate, and the tree takes years before it bears a dollar. The risk is rigged against the resilient choice.
Here’s what the rigged math costs this county. When an insurance check does come, it comes from a company desk in Des Moines or Omaha — but it gets spent here, at the feed mill and the co-op and the parts house where I buy gaskets. A field that floods every spring is a field that eventually won’t get insured at all, and a farm that can’t get insured is a farm that sells out to the big operator or sits in a trust. Then the land’s assessed value drops, the school district’s property tax base drops with it, and the kid in the back of Sara’s classroom eats the loss. It’s never only a federal deficit. It’s the feed mill’s slow winter and the county that keeps losing the places where money circulates.
All of this is on the table right now. The farm bill is in the Senate, and Senate Republicans have insisted on cutting the conservation programs while refusing to touch crop-insurance reform — one big reason the bill hasn’t moved. It would take maybe two lines to make the Land and Water office’s job easier this winter: money in CSP and EQIP so they can sign up every farmer on the list, and an insurance rule that rewards winter roots instead of taxing them. That’s not a new farm program. That’s the oldest infrastructure there is — topsoil, kept where it belongs.
The Super El Niño won’t wait for the conference committee. It’s coming this winter, and the fields that meet it bare will be the ones that flood. The fields with roots will take the rain and hold the ground. I know which field I’d rather be driving past in March, when the snow’s off and the question is whether the topsoil is still there.