NEW PROVIDENCE, La. -- With crop prices soaring, farmers along the lower Mississippi River had been expecting a big year. Maybe even a huge one.

Now, many are facing ruin, with floodwaters swallowing up corn, cotton, rice and soybean fields.

And even more farmland will be drowned in the coming days if engineers throw open a spillway for the first time in 38 years, as they are expected to do, sometime over the weekend. Unlocking the spillway would inundate Louisiana Cajun country with as much as 25 feet of water but would ease the pressure on levees downstream, averting a potentially bigger disaster in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Trouble has already found the fields in far northeastern Louisiana, where Tap Parker and about 50 other farmers filled and stacked massive sandbags along an old levee to no avail. The Mississippi flowed over the top Thursday, and nearly 19 square miles of soybeans and corn, known in the industry as "green gold," was lost.

"This was supposed to be our good year. We had a chance to really catch up. Now we're scrambling to break even," said Parker, who has been farming since 1985.

David Fuller's view These latest developments in the Mississippi delta flooding are bad news for crops in the USA. Europe faces the opposite conditions with hot dry weather. Drought is also a problem in Texas and parts of China's grain region.

Grain markets are not yet reflecting these latest problems, due to some recent deleveraging, but this is likely to change in coming months.