To rain or not to rain.......

I think it's times like these that you fully understand why farmers are generally religious people. For most, their entire livelihood depends on what kind of crop yield they get each year. If they have a great year, they do really well. If they have a bad year, it could bankrupt them.

This week, we've received a ton of rain in the Midwest. The river and flood levels are equal to what we saw in the floods that hit this area 14 years ago. That was called a '100 year flood'. Unfortunately, it didn't take 14 years for it to happen again. The same towns that were flooded out 14 years ago are now being flooded again. I'm not sure why those people even moved back to those areas, but that's another story.

Farmers have fields that are under water or extremely saturated. Some of these crops can't handle those conditions. While there is crop insurance which farmers can buy to minimize their losses to deal with the crop loss, it doesn't even come close to covering the full loss. There's going to be a lot of farmers living pretty meager existences for most of the year because they aren't going to have much in the way of crop yield unless they have a field on top of a hill.

So why are they religions? Because at times like these, all you can do is just pray it stops raining. Also, you have to hope that your prayer doesn't work so well that you end up with a drought in the summer heat of August.