Field inundation causes multiple problems and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists and the farmers they work with are sounding the alarm. Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Larry Dallas's farm in Central Illinois's Douglas County is as flat as it gets. That's a good thing for planting straight rows and maneuvering farm equipment in the field, but there's a major downside, too. "Heavier rain is hard for us to deal with because of the poorly drained soils and the lack of any roll to the ground. It's hard for the water to get away when the rain starts," Dallas said. "We have installed a lot of drainage tile trying to mitigate that." But tile drains are no match for increasingly intense precipitation events. In the spring of 2019, for example, widespread flooding drenched the Midwest to devastating effect, causing record losses across the entire agricultural industry. "2019 was a nightmare. We did everything in the mud and had a lot of crops drowning out," Dallas recalled.…