CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The best land Brad Daugherty farms is 300 acres of Wabash River bottom, where high water regularly washes in nutrient-rich sediment.

This spring the 56-year-old farmer planted all 300 acres in corn, and went back and replanted half of it when heavy rain kept his seeds from germinating.

Then, last weekend came more rain, and lots of it, washing away everything Daugherty planted.

“It’s seven foot under water right now,” he said as he worked on a levee at his farm near West Union, along the Indiana border.

“It’ll be every bit of two weeks” before it drains and dries, he said. “If not longer.”

Now what?

That’s a question a lot of farmers across Illinois find themselves asking as the wet, cool early spring that slowed planting and growth becomes a wet, warm late spring threatening to wash away a good chunk of an expected 12.6 million-acre corn crop.

The odds couldn’t be much higher.

Escalating food prices have put tremendous pressure on farmers to produce bumper crops this year. But because of heavy rain in Illinois, and even more so in the other key corn states of Iowa and Indiana, corn futures prices have set new records above $7 a bushel this week.

And that threatens to push food prices even higher. Corn is used in a wide range of products from cereals to sodas, and as a livestock feed.

“It’s going to take its toll a little bit on livestock producers, and I think would have some impact on retail meat prices down the road,” said Darrel Good, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois.

Iowa is the nation’s top corn state, growing 13.85 million acres last year, about 16 percent of the U.S. corn crop, according to the USDA. Illinois was the No. 2 producer, with 13.05 million acres.

It’s too early to estimate how much the rain could end up cutting into the size or value of Illinois’ corn crop. But crop experts say that if this year’s crop is only 10 or 12 percent smaller than last year’s, farmers should be happy.

University of Illinois agronomist Emerson Nafziger is reluctant to predict where the corn crop could end up. But he says, based on what he’s seen and heard about so far, farmers would do well to average 150 bushels an acre.

That’s 23 bushels less than last year, and at current prices would cut the value of every acre produced by more than $160. That would cut the potential value of the crop by more than $2 billion, more than a fifth of the value of all corn produced in the state in 2007.

Nafziger says a lot of the state’s corn, even if it hasn’t been under water, has sat in saturated soil for a long time. And he said corn roots don’t grow under those conditions That makes the plants vulnerable to a host of problems over the summer, among them dry periods, when healthy corn roots would be able to reach moisture stored in the soil.

“We certainly know there’s been almost nothing about this spring that has set this crop up well to withstand stresses,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said earlier this week that just over half the corn growing in Illinois this spring is in no better than fair condition. Fourteen percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition.

The southeastern corner of the state, where Daugherty farms, has had it worse than most.

More than 10 inches of rain have fallen in some spots in the past week, and some farmers in Jasper and Clark counties have watched their crops either wash away or fail to come up at all more than once, said Tony Trimble, manager of the Illinois Farm Bureau offices in the two counties, about 100 miles east of St. Louis.

“Some are going to have to replant a third time,” he said, then repeating, as if he didn’t believe it himself, “a third time.”

As he worked Wednesday, Daugherty weighed what to do with his land along the river bottom. He could fall back on crop insurance, he said, but that would do no more than cover his costs.

He said his best bet, if the land dries quickly enough, is to plant it with soybeans.

“If we can get beans in there and beans stay where they are, yeah, we can make some good money out of beans.”