Ed Marshall is sitting hunched over in a makeshift office in Charleston, Mo., studying photos of his very wet farmland. He doesn’t blink as he clicks through each one, his eyes wide over the frame of his reading glasses.
The images show Marshall’s personal connection to a flooding disaster that left 130,000 acres of homes, fields and equipment under water here in southeast Missouri. The Mississippi River — which surged in last month when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a levee to save a town downstream — still covers the area.
With uncertainty looming over if and when the levee will be fixed, Marshall and the other 200 or so affected farmers face enormous challenges to their livelihood.
First, there are the immediate losses to consider.
“It’s gonna cost me a million and a half dollars,” Marshall said. “And that’s if I can get in between now and the middle of June and get beans, get my beans planted.”
Marshall said the wheat, fertilizer and pesticide under water is a complete loss, and he’ll be lucky to get a 50 percent return from crop insurance.
Even if the water recedes, Marshall’s prime soybean ground may be too wet for him to risk running heavy planting equipment over unstable soil.
“Unless you get perfect weather and no rain, that’s just not gonna happen. So, it may very well be a pipe dream,” he said.
There are other immediate concerns as well.
“They’re going to smell some horrible smells,” said Richard Oswald, who farms in northwest Missouri. “You can’t imagine the smell on the river bottom after a flood. Organic matter on the river bottom from the crop smells and smells and smells...”
Oswald’s farm survived the Great Flood of 1993, the costliest flood in the history of the United States. He said the cleanup will take months.
“And they’ll have a lot of sleepless nights. Whether there’s going to be enough money to fix everything, what their standard of living is going to be, or even if their farm is going to survive,” he said. “And really not knowing ... that you won’t have to do it again next year.”
Oswald said he had an excellent crop the year after the Great Flood. But the story might be a bit different for southeast Missouri farmers. Even now, weeks after the levee was blasted open, the river is still flowing in.
“It is certainly gouging out and eroding a lot of land. And if you’ve got massive volumes of water, you’ll take massive areas of the landscape — you’ll just take it away. That pretty much destroys that land,” saidRoger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, which represents state farmers unions.
Johnson said soil quality will depend on the flow of the water over the soil and what sort of damage occurred. If the fertile topsoil is gone, rock, gravel or sand that takes its place will have to be removed.
Farmers along the Mississippi should expect their next few seasons to be about cleanup,” he said.
“Certainly not every farmer will be in this spot, but there will be a number of farmers who will be in this spot,” Johnson said. “Sometimes, instead of making money, you lose a whole bunch of money.”
While southeast Missouri farmers are hopeful that the river will soon go back to its usual boundary now that the crest is falling, they may face other battles over the land.
For one thing, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers doesn’t plan to fix the levee until next year, and a temporary levee is out of the question. The first step will be completing a damage assessment along the portion of the Mississippi that flooded this spring. That means first assessing miles of floodplain from southeast Missouri down to the Gulf of Mexico.
It also turns out that this land is being eyed for potential wetland reclamation. Some environmentalists reason farmland like this that was once wetland land is better off as it was hundreds of years ago.
U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, who serves this corner of Missouri, rejects the idea of wetland reclamation, and said she will defend her farmer constituents.
“There is a happy medium, and the happy medium is, you’ve got producers who’ve lived on this land for generations, and they’ve taken care of it,” she said. “My farmers are in a pile of hurt right now and they deserve every opportunity to rebuild their lives and their livelihoods.”
In late May, the Missouri Farm Bureau filed an appeal to President Obama to expedite permanent levee repairs and to find financial assistance to do so.
