After the rains, grueling cleanup on the farm

Dennis Tweet spent much of Thursday trudging through messy fields on his farm to fix a fence damaged by flooding that followed this week's heavy rainfalls.

Thursday's weather: Dayton declares emergency in 35 counties; officials warn of flooding's health risks

Photo gallery: It just keeps raining. And raining.

He spent a lot of time splashing and occasionally stumbling through a ditch. In some places, the water was knee deep.

"Oh, golly, I hit a deep hole there," Tweet said after one misstep.

Rain and hail have made a mess of thousands of acres of Minnesota farmland, so much so that U.S. Agriculture Department officials are out assessing the toll. They don't have a state-wide damage estimate yet, but farmers don't need an official assessment to know that the storms have created a lot of extra work.

Since the series of storms began Saturday, some farmers in southwest Minnesota have measured nearly a foot of rainfall.

The rain caused a creek running through Tweet's farm to overflow. As he slogged through his fields on the way to the broken fence, flood water bashed his fence with all sorts of debris before he spotted a six-foot branch tangled in the barb wire.

"I can just as well get these trees out of here so that they won't have to do this to me again," Tweet said.

After he wrestled the branch free, he tossed it over the fence into the ditch.

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After the rains, grueling cleanup on the farm