Christian Science Monitor: “Farms alone could take a $2 billion hit from the flooding, estimates John Michael Riley, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State University. “The impacts are pretty large,” he says, since much of the land near the river is agricultural – used for farming catfish, cotton, and grains such as corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice. And the flooding has spanned a large region encompassing parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Still, for all the thousands of acres at risk, these affected lands are just a piece of a much larger US farm industry. Flooding could add to upward pressure on food prices, but not in a way that’s visible at the grocery store.”