Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two older poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

MRCTI, which represents 105 cities in 10 states in the Mississippi River Basin, including Wisconsin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

Pilot will test usefulness of new ‘parametric’ insurance policies

The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the president, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

“You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI and, as of Nov. 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

“In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

“The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now, and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy, but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

“Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu — the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90% of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

“The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine’s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All, argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t (pay every year),” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod. 

The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

“The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

“You’ve got to reduce the risk (or) you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

For 20 years, Pablo Sobron sought a better way to learn exactly what was in the soil, rock or any other substance on Mars. 

Instead of sampling and laboratory analysis — the old way of soil testing — scientists began to use lasers and sensors to get high-precision data quickly. Eventually, that led Sobron to think the same type of technology could work on Earth, particularly farms.

“The idea is to do exactly what we do on Mars, which is drive and, without stopping, get real time measurements of every square inch if you want to. As small as you want,” he said.

Impossible Sensing, the company Sobron founded in St. Louis, is now working on the second iteration of a prototype, designed to be mounted to the back of a planter. It will help farmers see exactly what’s happening in their soil in real time as they drive through their fields, revealing information about nutrient levels, soil health, water conditions and other factors around individual plants.

“Our thinking is that having more precision on knowing what areas of the farm can take more or less (fertilizer) will allow them to apply what’s needed,” he said. “The real value and the real need here is to give insights, give knowledge, prescribe what to do and when.”

It’s what precision agriculture has promised since the 1990s — if growers get more granular data about their operations and the technology, they will put that newfound information to use for more efficient and sustainable farms. 

Yet, Sobron admits all the new technology around precision ag has yet to fully transform farming. 

“It’s not delivering on the hype that it was sold,” Sobron said.

There have been many advancements over the years that have boosted precision. New tractors can use GPS to steer themselves, and farmers now have the ability to change the rate at which they apply seeds or fertilizer on their fields. Even crop genetics and how weeds are managed have advanced. 

“The only thing we have not advanced is the sensor,” he said. “The ability to see things that matter, in both the plants, the soil and the roots.”

All of that data should help farmers make choices that will not only boost their bottom line, but curb the overuse of fertilizers and other chemicals and be more targeted about irrigation. 

A broader trend

The federal government also has an eye on more targeted fertilizer use. Speaking in southern Illinois in May, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the farm bill proposed by Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow supports research into new sensing technology.

“Many of our corn acres are being over-fertilized,” he said. “As sensor technology gets more readily available, precision agriculture is an opportunity for us to really educate farmers.”

Vilsack said these kinds of sensors could help farmers reduce the overuse of fertilizer, which runs off of farms, polluting rivers, lakes, groundwater and even the Gulf of Mexico. 

Attention from the federal government can entice many companies to focus on developing the technology, said Alison Doyle, associate director at the Iowa State University Research Park.

“Whatever the government becomes interested in, dumps federal money into, you’re going to see people innovating in those spaces,” she said. “Because there’s going to be money to drive behavior in that area.”

Sobron’s Impossible Sensing isn’t the only company looking to bring more precision, automation or other technology to farming practices. Many bigger ag companies are also looking beyond seeds, fertilizer and traditional farm equipment.

“There’s a trend right now, in agriculture, where a lot of the companies are positioning themselves more in the tech space than traditional ag,” Doyle said.

Labor is a critical driver: There aren’t as many people farming now than there were in the past, she said, and today’s farms are orders of magnitude bigger than the few hundred acres they were when her grandfather was a farmer.

“When you have an operation that large, where commodity prices and all the input prices are where they are, you’re looking for a tiny little bit of margin wherever you can find it,” she said. “And so these precision tools become necessary.”

Appetite for risk

But however promising new precision tools, like Sobron’s laser sensor or geospatial data from drones or satellites, are, it’ll likely take years for them to be adopted on thousands, let alone millions of farming acres.

“Experimentation is a risk,” said Bill Leigh, who farms about 2,200 acres of corn and soybeans with his brother in Marshall County, Illinois. 

Since he started in the early 1980s, Leigh said he has introduced more precision tools to his arsenal of equipment, which have helped him more efficiently plant seeds or apply fertilizer, herbicides and fungicides. 

But this change has been gradual, he explained.

“It’s not a jump in with both feet, it’s a process,” Leigh said. “It’s just too expensive and there’s too much at risk to take that flying leap and realize there’s not a high jump pit at the end, it’s a piece of concrete.”

With new technology, or even just a different farming management practice, Leigh said he wants to be sure he knows how it’s going to work on his farmland. It helps to interface with someone else who may have some experience with it, he added.

“If not, you better do it on a small level because you don’t want to belly flop it,” Leigh said. “You might do that for one year and survive, but the second year might get real hard.”

This is the economic imperative at the core of bringing new technology to farms: Growers like Leigh must see a clear financial return to continue to justify investing in something new or expanding it across more of their acreage.

“There’s all kinds of ways to spend money,” he said.

The precision tool of drone imagery is a good example. Drones can reveal if a crop is stressed or facing other issues that aren’t visible from the side of the road, said Jonathan Aguilar, an irrigation engineer and associate professor with Kansas State University.

“Some farmers have tried drones before, and the way they saw it was, ‘It’s just another pretty picture,’” he said. “We are trying to make sure those pictures are actually information that they could make action out of.”

Sobron agrees.

“Data that is not actionable is just data,” he said. “And we have too much data already.”

40 chances to experiment 

There’s also the fundamental challenge of farming’s seasonality. It takes months, if not a full growing season to understand how a new piece of technology performed, said BioSTL Agrifood Director Chad Zimmerman.

“You’ve got about 40 seasons in a working lifetime where you’re gonna try something new (and still) make a profit for your family,” he said. “That’s very few seasons if you think about it that way.”

Zimmerman argues it’s unfair to expect farmers to be the only ones to bear the financial uncertainty that can come with changing their practices for the benefit of the environment.

“These are still individuals’ businesses, it’s their way of life,” he said. “We can’t be asking them to take on more risk, to just take a decrease in their profit to accomplish somebody else’s goal.”

New agricultural technology can help farmers grow more food with less fertilizer and chemical inputs, but it won’t fully deliver the cost and environmental benefits until scaled across the millions of acres.

That puts pressure on companies big and small to prove their precision ag technology really works, Sobron said. 

“It’s on the John Deere’s, on us to create that value and show it,” he said. “Only when it’s shown, and it’s reliable and demonstrable, farmers will pick it up en masse.”

Sobron added he expects this will happen with his sensor in just a few years.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

‘Precision ag’ promised a farming revolution. It’s coming, just slowly is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

A hot summer and dry spring have brought drought to a large part of the Midwest.

The lack of moisture has far-reaching implications, including on agriculture and water levels on the country’s largest rivers.

“Rain is essential — it is where drought starts and ends,” said Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. “As we were going into drought from April through June, we just weren’t getting rain.”

The situation highlights the complexity of exiting drought when a state or region can slip into it relatively easily, Ford said. Rainfall across parts of the Midwest in recent weeks is helpful, but it may not be enough to alleviate the dryness, he said.

Different kinds of rain

One complicating factor is the changing climate, which is causing increasingly sporadic rain events that can drop inches of rain in only a few hours when they do come, said Jason Knouft, a biology professor at St. Louis University who studies the impacts of human activities on freshwater resources.

“Those seem to be more common than these long soaking rains,” he said. “When we get these intense rainfall events, you’ve got a lot of water hitting the landscape really quickly.”

The Northeast — especially Vermont — and parts of western Kentucky both experienced intense rain events this month, which spurred significant flooding. The dry ground cannot absorb all the water that comes in these kinds of storms, Knouft said.

“When you dump a huge amount of water onto a surface, even if you’re dumping it onto soil, there’s only so much the soil can absorb,” he said.

The rest runs off, meaning a local watershed is capturing only a fraction of all of the rain that fell, Ford said. He points to the St. Louis region as an example, which is close to the anniversary of historic rainfall last year.

The nine inches that fell in late July helped propel last summer to rank as the sixth wettest of all time for St. Louis, even though the region was quite dry beforehand, Ford explained.

“The majority runs off. It’s down the Mississippi, down to the Gulf. It’s gone” he said.

What’s in the ground

Soil conditions also play an important role in drought relief. But what’s growing in the ground isn’t always the best at capturing water, Knouft said.

“We’ve got these row crops that don’t have particularly deep roots,” he said. “So when the rain falls, there’s not as much stability in the soil.”

The water just washes the soil away.

Cover crops, when a field isn’t in active agricultural production, can help soils retain more water from rain, Knouft said. Perennial crops aid, too, because their roots are deeper and maintain the soil integrity, which in turn makes it easier to hold onto water, he added.

Various crops also respond to drought differently. Corn and soybeans can bounce back from early season dryness if given some rain, though current forecasts have some worried about severe crop damage.

Other crops aren’t as resilient on an annual basis, Ford said.

“We’ve seen more widespread impacts to pasture and hay conditions,” he said, explaining that grasses often stop producing when they are dry.

Those pasture lands may not return to productivity until next year, Ford added, which highlights how complicated it can be for an area to get out of drought.

He said if rainfall increases to normal amounts, the Midwest will see relief for corn and soybean crops this season. But it takes much longer for groundwater reserves to recover from being drawn down.

Flow on the nation’s biggest rivers

This year’s drought is also raising concern about low flows on rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri.

“It’s really the third summer in a row where we’ve had some sort of classification of drought in the majority of the basin,” said Mike Welvaert, service coordination hydrologist for the North Central River Forecast Center. “Most of the reservoirs, lakes, and some of the smaller rivers and such just don’t have that much water in them.”

Water is trickling out of those resources, but only the minimum to sustain river flows, Welvaert said. That’s been the case already for weeks, he explained.

Already some states have issued water restrictions because of the prolonged dryness, Welvaert added.

“The fact that we’re so low, so early in the year,” Welvaert said, “…that is where our concern lies.”

It comes ahead of the Mississippi River’s natural low point of the year in the fall.

“It’s the lowest time for rivers because it’s the cumulative effect of all the evaporation that happened in the summertime,” Ford said, in addition to surface water being used for irrigation of lawns and agriculture.

The drought conditions are affecting the Mississippi’s levels because there’s less overall water in the ground that contributes to the base flow in the river and its tributaries, Welvaert said.

In more normal springs and summers, precipitation falls frequently and percolates into the ground, sometimes deep into the soil, he explained. It can then return to the surface as a spring or another source of groundwater, Welvaert added.

“That’s how most of the rivers maintain their certain level of water even when it’s dry out,” he said. “They’re getting water from underground sources.”

But the dryness across the upper Midwest and Great Plains means the top layer of soil is soaking up rain when it does fall, Welvaert said.

“We just don’t have any additional water to send downstream even when it does rain,” he said. “The same thing is happening in the Missouri Basin.”

Both Welvaert and Ford stressed that the Mississippi’s fate for this year isn’t sealed yet. The weather patterns can still shift and produce a string of thunderstorms that drop consistent rain across the entire basin, Welvaert said.

“We really need more prolonged rainfall, but we can keep it at bay if we get the right amount of rain in the right places at the right times,” Welvaert said. “We’re still hoping for some of that to happen.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Most of the Midwest is in drought – and there’s no simple way to get out of it is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.