Except for a handful of drought years in the late 1980s and 2000s, most of my weather-related stories as an agricultural reporter have been about flooding.

The stories detailed how excessive rains destroyed and damaged fields and pastures, and the emotional and economic toll that took on the farm and ranch families who owned them.

One excessively wet summer in particular — 1993 — has always stood out in my mind because that year Eric Hylden, a Grand Forks (North Dakota) photographer, and I took a three-day trip covering flooding from South Dakota to southern Minnesota to northern Iowa.

Eric and I chronicled the trip with photos and stories that we got by talking to dozens of farmers and ranchers in the three states.

The headlines of the stories included “The Deluge; The flood of 1993 is taking a toll on the farms and small towns caught in its path.”

More than 30 years later, Agweek reporters Kennedy Tesch and Ariana Schumacher are covering similar flooding , some of it within 50 miles of where Hylden and I interviewed farmers for their flood story.

Kevin Crisp, one of the farmers we talked to, lived near Dell Rapids, South Dakota, in Minnehaha County, 40 miles from Salem South Dakota, which is in McCook County. Tesch and Schumacher’s story in the July 1, 2024, issue of Agweek said that Kurt Stiefvater’s farm had seen 10.61 inches of rain from June 1 to June 24. Flooding had affected around 70% of his pasture and cropland.

My story in the July 18,1993, Agweek reported that in mid-July 1993, Crisp still had 30 acres of the previous year’s corn in the field. He had to leave the crop in the field in the fall of 1992 because it was too wet and had hoped to harvest it in the spring of 1993.

Not only was it still too wet to harvest those 30 acres, but the rains had stunted his 1993 corn crop and he had to delay his first round of cultivating until July 12, a date he typically would have finished his second trip through the field.

The story quotes Crisp saying, “Too much rain is worse than not enough. When there’s not enough, you don’t feel so helpless. When there’s too much you can’t do anything. You can't hook up a planter, you can’t hook up to a cultivator, you can’t do anything.”

Conditions were even more grim across the border in southwest Minnesota in 1993 where 30 inches of rain fell between April and mid-July. That amount was 6 more inches than the county typically gets in a year.

That year rains prevented farmers from planting 7% of the county’s 350,000 acres and damaged the rest, my July 18, 1993, story reported. One of the reasons the stories Eric and I covered about the summer of 1993 Midwest flooding have stuck with me was because we viewed it and the people it affected, first-hand. I have never forgotten how a farming couple, Eric and I climbed a 110-feet high Harvestore silo for a birds-eye view of the water surrounding their farm.

More accurately, the former three climbed to the top and I stopped about three-quarters of the way up to the top because I broke the “never look down” rule and got scared. I never knew I was afraid of heights until that experience. Eric, who grew up on a dairy farm climbed to the top carrying his camera gear.

When the highest thing I’d climbed was a 15-foot ladder, it had been easy to believe that heights didn’t faze me, but I realized my limits that day.

Another thing I learned from the flood coverage is that farmers and ranchers are resilient and that no matter how bad things are, most of them have faith it will get better — and it does, some way or another.

In an ideal farming world, a new generation of Agweek reporters wouldn’t be writing stories describing flooding conditions that mirror the ones that I wrote about 31 years ago.

I’m certain that in June and July 2024 Tesch and Schumacher, like me in July 1993, wished they could have been reporting on good growing conditions yielding potential for great crops. But flooding, drought and other weather challenges will always be the realism of farming.

In the midst of that, most farmers and ranchers dig deep into whatever helps them to weather the weather and keep moving forward.

That “things will be better next year” attitude is what has kept and will keep generations of them on the land.

Ann Bailey lives on a farmstead near Larimore, North Dakota, that has been in her family since 1911. You can reach her at anntbailey58@gmail.com.

Opinion by Ann Bailey