Another grueling summer disaster season is arriving, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency is under intense pressure even as its portfolio balloons, it pleads for more money from Congress, and criticism comes on several fronts.

The agency manages more than 300 disaster declarations a year, a dramatic increase from the average of 108 disasters it responded to just a decade ago. For 2022, the disaster outlook is daunting.

Louisiana already has 1 million gallons of fuel available if needed for its hurricane response efforts. State lawmakers are considering setting aside another 4 million gallons to address critical shortages in the wake of major storms.

Rep. Daryl Deshotel, R-Hessmer, has proposed the Louisiana Strategic Fuel Reserve in House Bill 1057. It calls for the state to spend $25 million to build three storage tanks at the Central Louisiana Regional Port in Alexandria, according to the bill’s fiscal note. Two tanks would hold gasoline and diesel, and the third would contain ethanol for blending fuels.

One of the major inflationary forces of 2021 has been the weather.

Wild weather around the world wreaked havoc on markets for raw materials, lifting prices for everything from electricity and heat to houses and breakfast cereal.

This week's U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) report finds continued deterioration in drought-like conditions across areas of the Mid-Atlantic (Virginia, North Carolina) and the Southeast (South Carolina, Georgia) in response to below-normal precipitation (past 30- to 90-day period), declining soil moisture and streamflow levels.

Also, the drought conditions expanded and intensified on the map in areas of the South including Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas as well as in the Southern Plains of Oklahoma, where overall warm and dry conditions have prevailed during the past 30- to 120-day period, according to the Drought Monitor map.

Hurricane Ida ravaged Louisiana agriculture this fall. The hurricane brought as much as two feet of rain in some areas, as producers grappled with losses and aftermath.

"My community took a hell of a beating," Ashly Pitre, president of LaFourche Parish Cattleman's Association, told "This Week in Louisiana Agriculture."

Cattle were stranded for days, and producers worked around the clock to get to their livestock and move them to safety. But even then, the Hurricane left its mark, as This Week in Louisiana Agriculture covered it first-hand this year.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is known for damming rivers and building levees to keep waterways at bay. But a new initiative seeks natural flood control solutions as climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather events that test the limits of concrete and steel.