Farmers’ Fortunes Take a Turn From Drought to Drenched : Midwest: For years, crops died as they prayed for rain. Now those who live off the land have been hit with a deluge, and the future looks brighter.

Two years ago, Carl Marriott’s farm fields were dusty, his soybeans were shriveled, his prospects bleak. This spring, he has a different brown, sickly crop, but there’s a different culprit: rain.

Yes, rain--the manna from heaven Midwest farmers hoped and prayed for these last few years--has flooded fields, delayed planting and damaged crops. But survivors of one, or even two, consecutive droughts aren’t complaining.

“We just roll with the punches. We’ve got options we can pull out of the bag when it’s wet,” said Marriott, a southern Illinois farmer who may lose a quarter of his waterlogged wheat crop. “When it’s dry, there’s nothing we can do.”

“We’ve been biting our tongues,” said Mark White, a Chariton, Iowa, farmer whose fields were parched in 1988 and ‘89, then too muddy to work all last month. “I’ll take a wet year over a dry year any time. At least you’ve got a chance to grow something.”

After the most devastating decade in half a century, marred by drought, high interest rates and plummeting land values, many farmers have entered the 1990s with one of the wettest springs in recent times and the brightest outlook in 10 years.

“The farmer is in the best shape he’s been since 1980,” said Gregory Hanson, an economist at the U.S. Agriculture Department. “We’ve got rising land values . . . rising sales, rising investment. I’m not trying to paint a Pollyanna picture--on the other hand, there’s the famous rubber ball theory of economics: What bounced down is now bouncing up.”

Although an unseasonably cool, wet spring may prevent a bumper crop, the economic forecast is promising: cash income for the farm sector, which includes government subsidies, has been projected at $55 billion to $59 billion for 1990--a record if it reaches the outer limit and better than last year’s estimated $54 billion.

Hog and cattle prices are at or near record levels, corn prices are up because the surplus is down, farm exports have increased, land values are expected to rise about 4% in 1990--about the same level they did in 1989--and machinery sales have jumped by 50% in the last four years.

“When I look at the farm economy, I look at a growth sector,” Hanson said. “Ten years ago, it was a sector ready to take a fall.”

The national farm debt, which peaked in 1983 at $206 billion, could dip as low as $145 billion in 1990, he said.

Farmers who survived the ‘80s are smarter and more careful about their purchases, said Neil Harl, an economics professor at Iowa State University.

“Some have been burned, some were singed, some were just close to the heat,” he said. At the same time, he added, “Lenders are more cautious and conservative.”

As the new decade begins, some signs of a turnaround are due to the weather, some to a reversal in economic fortunes. For example:

* In Kansas, a record winter wheat crop is forecast for 1990: 460.2 million bushels, more than double last year’s drought-battered 213.6 million bushels.

“They’re laughing,” Jim Shroyer, extension agronomist at Kansas State University, said of the farmers. “They’re really looking forward to harvest. This really lifts their spirits.”

Nationally, winter wheat production is expected to reach a nine-year high of 2 billion bushels, despite some losses from wet weather.

* In Iowa, land values jumped nearly 45% from 1986 to 1989, although they’re still far below 1981 peak levels. Less than one in five farmers had significant money troubles last year, contrasted with a third in 1986, Harl said.

* In Minnesota, state officials say soil moisture is the best it has been since November, 1986.

Despite such optimistic signs, drought persists in areas, including Florida and parts of Colorado. In California, in its fourth straight dry year, reservoirs are low enough that the state and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation cut in half the amount of this year’s irrigation water to farmers.

And in the upper Midwest, even though puddles in the fields make people smile--a recent wet spell in North Dakota was dubbed the “million-dollar” rain--they haven’t persuaded anyone the drought is over.

“By no means are we out of the woods,” said Tim Edman, special assistant to South Dakota Gov. George S. Mickelson. “If we go back to the 90 degree-plus windy, dry weather conditions, we could be facing a problem very quickly just as serious as the last two years.”

In 1988, all of South Dakota was declared a drought disaster area; last year, it was two-thirds of the state.

While many cursed the drought, others now say rainy, cool weather is no blessing.

In Michigan, for example, some apple growers say it’s reduced their crop. In Missouri, a fourth of the corn is in poor or very poor shape, and planting is five weeks behind schedule. And in Illinois, pastures with water belly-high to the livestock and fields too muddy to put a tractor in have farmers worried.

“It’s rained so much our wheat is full of blight,” said Herman Krone, who welcomed then-President Reagan to his shriveled southern Illinois farm fields in 1988. “Instead of ripening, it’s dying in standing water. . . . It’s been 43 years since I’ve seen something like this.”

But it’s too early to make dire predictions, and recent dry, sunny days allowed many farmers to get back into the fields. Some also say as time runs out to plant corn, they may switch to soybeans, which have a later growing season.

That’s an option for Marriott, a fourth-generation farmer who normally would have planted all his corn by now but had completed less than 5% by the second week of June, a situation to which he’s resigned.

“Farming is hills and valleys,” he said. “You have good crops some years, and some years, good prices--seldom together.”

“It’s either feast or famine,” said Bill Million, agriculture extension adviser in Adams County, in western Illinois. “Farmers are just taking it one day at a time.”