Mississippi floodwaters drowning corn, cotton, rice, soybean crops in La.

LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. (AP)

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.