Time between sowing tiny seeds and reaping valuable crops, droughts, floods, plagues of pests, tumbling trees, ravaging beasts—all threaten your livelihood and haunt your dreams. But the last seven years have been ridiculous.  In 2005, the sixth-most powerful hurricane ever recorded barreled through the Mississippi River Delta region, flattening $900 million worth of crops. Two years after Katrina, a "500-year flood" revisited the Midwestern corn belt—which, as the US Geological Survey pointed out at the time, marked the second "500-year flood" in 15 years.