Something I'm not buying on the news.....

[Whitewing]

....the loss of farmland due to flooding.

I just don't buy it.

Sure, this year's crops are destroyed. Perhaps some land is affected by sand deposits, etc, or even affected by pollution.

Fences, roads, and other man-made structures can also be adversely affected or destroyed.

But the storyline that the land is lost for a generation? Come on.

A hundred years ago when I was in college I was taught that periodic flooding was what made a lot of farmland as productive as it was. Of course, I was also taught there was a coming Ice Age. :lol:

 

[Anonymous]

Perhaps they (the media) is pushing just enough negative commentary to force the already depressed and hard-pressed farming/ag-community into selling thier land, so realtors can turn around and develop it into housing-tracts. Just a thought.

 

[MO_cows]

We live in the Missouri River bottoms and went through the 1993 floods. When the water is rushing, it scours off the topsoil and takes it away. It's likely to get deposited where it isn't gonna do anybody any good. Lots of prime farmland was damaged by those floods.

Our soil is sandy loam for about a foot, then mostly pure sand underneath. But some places the subsoil is a dark, almost black, heavy clay the locals call gumbo. The kind that sticks to your boots more with every step you take and you end up with 20 pound globs on each foot. Any field that got scoured down to gumbo or some other infertile subsoil with no organic matter or structure to it is gonna need a lot of work to get back in production.

 

[Whitewing]

We live in the Missouri River bottoms and went through the 1993 floods. When the water is rushing, it scours off the topsoil and takes it away. It's likely to get deposited where it isn't gonna do anybody any good. Lots of prime farmland was damaged by those floods.

Our soil is sandy loam for about a foot, then mostly pure sand underneath. But some places the subsoil is a dark, almost black, heavy clay the locals call gumbo. The kind that sticks to your boots more with every step you take and you end up with 20 pound globs on each foot. Any field that got scoured down to gumbo or some other infertile subsoil with no organic matter or structure to it is gonna need a lot of work to get back in production.

I certainly understand that scouring action can destroy the topsoil....I see it firsthand at my place during times of heavy rainfall. But short of an area relatively close to the main channel of a river, it wouldn't seem to me there would be a lot of problem from forceful scouring.

Of course, I'm from S. Louisiana. When a big river down here floods, it sometimes spreads out in all directions for miles because the land is so flat. Heck, much of S. Louisiana was created from silt deposited via the Mississippi River.....silt carried from hundreds of miles north.

 

[mrj]

And that long ago flooding of the delta regions was more natural.

With the breaching of the levies, many believed it would create different patterns of washing deep channels, washing away top soils, and depositing sand layers, from news stories I heard on Ag media. The responsible (of is it 'culpable'?) government agencies aren't telling it that way, I'm sure.

Part of the problem, at least in short growing season northern areas, such as eastern SD where the Prairie Pothole and Lakes region are flooded much worse than normal have quite a lot of land which hasn't been planted and may not be in time for crops, or at least not corn or soy beans, if it isn't done soon. I believe there are many other states with flood delayed planting that won't have long enough growing season left for typical crops. Demand for those crops has grown tremendously as our dollar drops in value, and other currencies are propped up artficially, putting additional pressures on the markets.

 

[jedstivers]

Lot of farmers in the flood area on this site.
http://talk.newagtalk.com/category-view.asp?showall=true