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North Dakota, durum wheat acres are expected to double, and the barley crop is projected to be almost 1 ½-times bigger. In South Dakota, this year's corn crop could be the biggest in state history.
• "It's been really great up here, (with) farmers getting into the fields," Schmidt said.
• Natural disasters ravaged 33 states last year, prompting more than $300 million in federal emergency assistance. The Dakotas were hit by flooding from the Missouri River, which cuts through both states and swelled with heavy rain that fell on top of ground still soaked from a snowy winter. North Dakota also saw historic flooding along the Souris River. Nearly 7 million acres of normally productive cropland went unseeded, about one-fifth of the land typically planted with annual crops in the

two states.
• The flooding hit hardest in North Dakota, where the amount of unseeded land in 2011 was historic. The federal Risk Management Agency and the federal Farm Service Agency, which use different methods of calculating "prevented planting" acres, estimate the number of acres that couldn't be seeded due to weather at between 5.3 million and 5.6 million. Both figures shattered the 1999 record of 3.9 million

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