Blake Gerard turned flood-drowned Illinois cornfields into the state's only rice farm

Blake Gerard took over his family's farm near the Ohio-Mississippi confluence in 1990, at 22, after his father died mid-season. The bottomland had always flooded — his grandfather remembered 1943 and 1973 — but by the 1990s floods came every two years, and pumps only pushed water in circles: it rose from under the ground. Gerard's choice was blunt — find a crop that grows in water, or quit.

In 1999 he planted his first 40 acres of rice, tripling the acreage the next season and converting 'like crazy' after that. Nothing supported the move: no mills, no market, no roadmap, no transition subsidies — federal policy, insurance and ethanol demand all prop up corn and soybeans. Land grading alone cost about $1,000 an acre as he flattened fields into cascading paddies walled by levees, and he spent millions more on pumps, turbines and equipment, borrowing young against a debt few mid-career farmers would carry. Rice, he says, is double or triple the work of corn and beans.

By 2024 the gamble had paid: Gerard runs one of America's northernmost commercial rice farms — the only one in Illinois — on 2,500 acres of flood-prone Alexander County bottomland, and his 25th rice crop was his most successful year yet. He no longer wonders whether the river will take the crop; rice treats the flood as irrigation. A Climate-Smart grant for soil sensors and pump automation was cancelled by the Trump administration in April 2025, then restored under a different name in May — a reminder that the policy system still doesn't know how to say yes to crop diversity.

From 40 trial acres of rice in 1999 to 2,500 acres; the 25th rice crop, in 2024, was his most successful year — flood risk to the crop is gone.

The insight was to read flooding as free irrigation rather than recurring loss — 'rain as free water,' in his words.

He underwrote the transition personally: millions in land grading and equipment with no government program behind him.

He scouted the knowledge himself, door to door in the Missouri Bootheel and Arkansas, where he learned his father had asked the same questions in the 1970s.

His case is now the reference point for Corn Belt diversification — proof of possibility and of how improbable it is without policy change.

When a physical constraint is permanent, stop fighting it and re-engineer the business around it — but expect the ecosystem (mills, markets, policy) to be built for the crop you left.

As of September 2025, Gerard remained the only commercial rice farmer in Illinois, running 2,500 acres and raising a son who left college to farm alongside him. His 2024 crop was his best rice year to date. Researchers studying the Diverse Corn Belt project cite his farm as evidence diversification is possible; the funding for climate-smart transitions was cancelled, then reinstated under another name, in 2025.