Receding river reveals damage

Associated Press

OMAHA, Neb.

As the Missouri River slowly recedes, farmers seeing their fields for the first time since June are encountering sand dunes, strange debris and deep gouges the floodwaters carved into their once-fertile land.

The soil quality also has been diminished because the floodwaters killed off many of the microbes that help crops grow and compacted the soil.

Officials don’t expect the Missouri to fully return to its banks until October, so farmers already busy with the fall harvest will have little time to rehab their fields before the onset of winter. Plus, farmers must wait for fields to dry out before doing any significant work with heavy equipment.

That means many of the hundreds of thousands of acres of flooded farmland along the Missouri River in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri may be out of production for at least a year — if not longer.

“It’s going to take many years to get this land back in shape for production,” said Scott Olson, who farms near Tekamah, Neb., and had about 500 acres under water all summer.

Olson said in one of his fields, floodwaters carved out a new ditch that’s about 300 feet wide, one-quarter- mile long, and more than 15-feet deep.

Olson has a pilot’s license and spent much of the summer tracking flooding in Nebraska and Iowa from the air. The damage he saw and pictures he posted on the website of his family’s equipment business, www.leevalley.net, are striking.

The flooding is a byproduct of unexpectedly heavy spring rains in the Upper Plains and above-average snowpack. The spring deluge prompted the Army Corps of Engineers to release massive amounts of water from the dams along the Missouri River all summer.

Experts in the region said some farmers will find severe damage.