DOWNS - There's a deja vu feeling in the countryside. Farmer Carl Neubauer fought against spring moisture to get his crops in the ground at his homestead in Downs as well as fields in the Shirley and Heyworth areas. Now, the five to seven inches of rain his farms received since Thursday have left a familiar sight.

"Now, we've refilled all those ponds again," Neubauer said.

Parts of Central Illinois' landscape are covered in water once again after remnants of Hurricane Ike dropped buckets of rain across the state. The sight also might be familiar for city dwellers who dealt with flooded streets and homes earlier this year, too.

As of Monday morning, State Farm Insurance Cos. had already received more than 3,400 claims in Illinois because of the storms, said spokeswoman Missy Lundberg. That very preliminary number is only expected to rise as State Farm agents were busy throughout the day taking claims, including in the Bloomington-Normal area, Lundberg said.

"We're getting a lot of water claims, flooded basements, flooded-out homes," she said.

Meanwhile, Country Financial has received 88 claims in the Bloomington-Normal area, said spokesman Jay Verner.

After a dry August in much of the area, rain earlier this month was a welcome sign for homeowners whose yards had started to brown and farmers whose crops needed some help going into the final stages of the growing season. But the most recent rain was not too helpful and actually pushed growers even further behind in an already off-schedule year.

In many years, farmers begin harvest on a limited basis after Labor Day, said Chad Hoke, assistant vice president and farm manager of Soy Capital Ag Services in Bloomington. Whereas the middle of September usually marks the time when farmers are really running the combines, growers are not even close to their start this year, Hoke said.

The growing season already was behind about two weeks, and the heavy rain pushed the start of harvest back another week to the middle of next week at the earliest, said Kim Craig, merchandiser for grain storage company Bell Enterprises, based in Deer Creek.

Recent rain means it's too wet for farmers to harvest some of their earliest-planted corn that might have been close to maturity, but the rest of the county's corn is behind schedule because of earlier cool weather and a lack of sunshine, Hoke said.

Neubauer didn't expect to begin harvest until Oct. 1 anyway, following a Sept. 20 start last year. But by the time ponds dry out on his soybean and corn fields, he might not start his end-of-season work until the following week.

"Soils are very saturated. We did see a lot of ponds, a lot of water running off," he said. "It's done some damage."

The extent of the damage is hard to know, but damp conditions will reduce yields some, Neubauer said. Soybeans suffered more than corn, he said.

Most of the ground in McLean County has enough slope that water flows off the land, Hoke said. But flatter land between Heyworth and LeRoy will be hurt more from wet patches, he said.

In a worse-case scenario, replanted soybean fields that had the potential to yield a lower-than-average 30 bushels an acre could produce just 10 bushels an acre if rain sits all week, Hoke said.

Corn could benefit from the weekend rain, which helps add kernel weight; however, excessive amounts bring other problems, such as corn stalks that can blow over or fall down from wind or disease, Hoke said.

Farmers also likely will harvest wetter corn than usual as the clock is ticking, Craig said.

"The window is getting smaller," Craig said. "That sets their whole season behind."