Under water: after the second catastrophic flood in 20 years, North Carolina farmers dig in once again, this time with more at stake.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Falling in sheets, it drenches the flat terrain, blotting out the two-lane country road a half-mile away across a field. Like many eastern North Carolina farms, a neat, white frame house nestles in the middle of a complex of dozens of equipment sheds, bulk tobacco barns, grain bins and other buildings that Gerald and Judy Tyner have spent most of a lifetime building. "Once you start farming, you just keep trying to advance yourself, adding on, always moving ahead," Gerald Tyner says, "day and night."

Quickly, the rain overwhelms the soil, and in the woods a few hundred yards out back, where the cussed beavers are making matters worse with their dams, Town Creek and the swamp are rising. As the rain falls harder, rushing their tractors, combines and other motorized equipment to higher ground, the Tyners don't have time for woolgathering. If they did, Gerald would think back to a 1999 storm named Floyd.

Seventeen years earlier, he'd looked back when his small boat reached dry land, seeing the house, buildings and crops underwater. "Well, that's it, everything's gone, and there's nothing I can do about it," he recalls thinking. The Tyners, however, did do something.

They went back to rebuilding, adding on, moving ahead.

Hurricane Matthew would dump 11.95 inches of rain in a span of 24 hours on this farm community near Elm City, on the county line between Wilson and Nash and north of Goldsboro, which got 15.24 inches. The Tyner rain gauge could measure only 4 inches before overflowing, but when the National Weather Service later generated a color map of Matthew's deluges, an angry magenta blob would hang menacingly over the Tyner farm.

Six months after Hurricane Matthew, like thousands of other eastern North Carolina farmers, the Tyners--Gerald, Judy and their strapping sons Gerald Jr. and Donnie--are still taking stock. "You'd be amazed at stuff you wouldn't believe that floats," Gerald Tyner says, stopping in the middle of building an earthen berm, or dike, around the house. During Floyd, water destroyed the floors and floor joists. This time, it rose high enough to destroy the heating and AC systems, about $38,000 in damage. Tyner estimates the storm caused another $40,000 in damage to farm shops and equipment. The remainder of roughly $250,000 in losses was in crops, including grain and tobacco. Water stood three feet deep in the bins and barns and swamped the soybean fields. All of it was insured, but crop insurance typically pays about...