COLUMN ONE : A Fickle Harvest of Luck : While floods drown neighbors’ fields, some farmers expect rain-fed bumper crops and markets buoyed by others’ misfortunes. It’s a season of profit-taking and paradox in the Corn Belt.

In a summer when the Mississippi is marauding through nearby cornfields and Eastern farms are frying in drought, Howard Mueller’s 700 acres appear lush, indeed.

“The beans look good. The corn looks excellent,” says the farmer, 63, whose gently rolling “hill ground” was tilled by his great-great-grandfather in the 1800s. “I think we’re OK--but we still need some more rains to make it.”

It is a season of paradox in America’s Corn Belt, a time of painful setbacks and profit-taking, killer rains and welcome showers, promising harvests and harvests lost.

Even as the roster of flood-ravaged farms has grown relentlessly, a different, less-noticed drama is unfolding.

In much of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, farmers who got off to an extraordinarily rough start this spring may soon produce bumper crops that could partly offset the losses in other places. There is just one if: The weather must continue to cooperate.

“If we can ripen the crop normally without getting an early frost into it, then we shouldn’t have much difficulty,” says Mueller, a friendly man in wire-frame glasses whose home displays century-old farm tools on a wall near a computer that tracks commodity prices.

Here in St. Clair County, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, the contrasts and ironies of this rainy season are graphically apparent. In Prairie du Pont, two levees gave way last weekend, flooding more than 50,000 acres as the water rushed toward Prairie du Rocher.

Clearly, the drenching rains have caused problems in this region of creeks and canals where many farmers are descended from German immigrants. Some couldn’t even finish the spring planting because of nonstop downpours. Here and there, cornstalks are stunted and sickly, light green in color.

Still, most of the fields sprawl safely above the flood-prone “bottoms,” and crops are standing tall. Soybean prices shot up in the wake of disaster, and even the growers who have suffered some water damage stand to profit.

“I hate to speak in these terms, but agriculture is a little bit cannibalistic,” says Joseph Wuebbels, who farms 1,800 acres in a flatland between the Mississippi and Kaskaskia rivers once dubbed Looking-Glass Prairie for its glistening grasses.

“Some of these guys have lost everything, but whatever we’ve lost will be made up for by increases in price.”

For all the news of flooded farms, the summer rains have been welcome in many areas east of the Mississippi, helping late-planted crops grow swiftly and compensate for the belated start.

Farmers in central and northern Illinois, where the dark soil often yields bountiful harvests, brag that they are in this year’s “garden spot.” A northbound drive on Interstate 55 toward Springfield and Decatur passes an endless stretch of fields bristling with perky cornstalks, taller than a man, and leafy soybean plants, some waist high.

The possibility of a bumper crop in the eastern Corn Belt is one of the reasons that grocery prices are forecast to rise less than 1%, despite the setbacks in Missouri and other states, analysts say.

To some of the farmers, however, the prospect of profiting from other people’s misery has sparked an unsettling mix of emotions.

In rural Auburn, south of Springfield, Garry Niemeyer expects that flood-related damage elsewhere could push his own profits up 15% this year. Still, he drove with his 15-year-old son, Tim, 90 minutes west to New Canton to help sandbag a levee (an effort that proved futile).

“This is probably the most mixed-up year I’ve ever seen,” says Niemeyer. “While we’re in an area that’s seeing some of the best of the best, you don’t have to go very far to see some of the worst of the worst. . . . My friend where the levee broke, he’s going to get zero.”

Outside Decatur, 30 miles east, William Penhallegon concurs: “We definitely have benefited from other people’s loss.” But he is more fatalistic than smug: “One day we’ll have a bad crop here in Central Illinois and they won’t in Iowa. We all take our turn with disasters.”

Much of the talk among farmers these days is about commodity prices, which can soar and dip as mysteriously as stocks on Wall Street. Reports of crop shortfalls, however, have been propelling them on an upward, if uneven, path in recent weeks.

Watching children parade prize cows at a 4-H Club fair in Belleville, Joseph Luechtefeld explains the gambit that he and other farmers are engaged in. The idea is to lock in higher prices now for delivery of crops at harvest. Many Midwestern farmers have made deals for a quarter or even a third of their harvest.

Corn prices have increased more modestly than soybeans, but farmers are hoping for a rally in the coming days.

“When soybeans hit $6 a bushel, people cashed in,” Luechtefeld says of a price level that had not been reached in a few years. “Now people here say, ‘Don’t sell them even at $7, because they’re going to $10.’ ” (Most soybean prices last week slipped back below $7.)

The confidence is a drastic shift from just this spring, when wet weather continually blocked efforts to plant crops in much of the Midwest. Since last fall, farmers say, rains seemed to hit St. Clair County every few days, turning soil into a treacherous, muddy trap for equipment.

Some farmers were at least a month late in planting. Almost 3,000 acres in the county--less than 1%--were left bare this year.

“Farmers would work the ground and get ready to plant and--boom--here comes another rain,” recalls Wilfred C. Quandt, an official with the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service in St. Clair County. “In many instances they had to prepare the ground several times.”

The rains continued right into the summer.

Wuebbels, whose farm is in Mascoutah on St. Clair’s eastern side, recalls the struggle to fertilize his fledgling cornstalks. A break in the clouds gave him and his two sons an achingly brief chance to inject nitrogen fertilizer into the soil between the cornrows, a process known as “side-dressing.”

“I told the boys, OK, if we’re going to do it, we have to do it today and tomorrow. We were up till 3 a.m., and the next day we were up at sunrise. We covered 250 acres in those two days.”

Wuebbels’ crop survived. But a couple miles away, fertile bottom land once under cultivation is now underwater. As the rains kept up, creeks and canals were unable to flow into the swollen Mississippi. Normally harmless trickles backed up, widened and buried several thousand acres under muddy water.

St. Clair’s flood plain includes bottoms along the Mississippi and Kaskaskia rivers, and numerous fingers of water that flow between the two.

“Once the water backs into a crop, with that hot sun we have, within 24 hours that crop is dead,” says Wuebbels. “It turns white as a sheet, and within several days it will collapse to the ground.”

For the many farmers spared such trauma, the extraordinarily wet July proved a blessing. Late-starting crops thrived under summer showers and grew exceptionally quickly. Much of the corn has sprouted tassels and survived the vital stage of pollination, which determines the quality of the ear. By some estimates, sections of St. Clair were drenched with up to 13 inches of rain last month, several times the average.

But the drama isn’t over. Howard Mueller, whose brother-in-law had to evacuate a flood-threatened farm just seven miles away from Stookey Township, says fast-growing cornstalks are brittle, leaving them vulnerable to wind and hail.

The peculiar season has left the corn vulnerable in another way: The claw-like brace roots, which stabilize stalks in wind, barely dug in this year, because the topsoil was so moist. Beyond that, the lateness of the planting could mean a late harvest this fall, raising the odds of frost damage.

Nationally, the flood and related bad weather, combined with the Southeast drought, could cut the corn harvest by 950 million bushels--12% below earlier forecasts, according to a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation in Park Ridge, Ill.

Soybean production could fall by 305 million bushels, or 14% below initial expectations.

Already, the complex economics of agriculture is creating winners and losers, with consumers affected only slightly. Some of the added costs, for instance, are being borne by livestock farmers who buy grain to feed their animals.

Bill Range, who is raising 25,000 hogs in the southeast St. Clair township of Marissa, watched glumly as the price of soy meal jumped 40% and cornmeal rose 10% in July. “We’ve got to feed our livestock. There’s nothing you can do about it,” he says.

Actually, breeders have some maneuvering room. They can substitute feed grains, such as wheat for corn, and they can raise prices as their costs go up. But in the competitive food marketplace, such price hikes are expected to be modest by the time they reach the consumer.

“Meat prices might increase slightly, six to 12 months down the road, but only temporarily,” concludes Terry Francl, senior economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Another reason so much flood damage will cause such modest disruption is that U.S. farmers and grain producers have a large surplus of corn from last year. Also, grains are just one part of many food products, further limiting the flood’s effect on grocery bills.

The cost of grains and cereals may creep up a bit, but “it’s not going to result in a significantly higher food bill for consumers,” says Joseph Uhl, an agricultural economist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Such forecasts assume that no further disaster is in store. But the farmers, keenly aware they cannot capitalize on higher prices if they lose their crops, aren’t so sure.

“We can’t relax too much,” declares Dave Biver, an outgoing man with suntanned arms who stands by a flatbed truck on his father’s Belleville farm. “The crops aren’t in the bin yet.”

As a work crew unloads his bales of straw, and cornfields shimmer under a steamy Midwest sun, Biver adds: “We’ll talk about 1993 for the rest of our lives.”