The Missouri River retreats leaving behind diminished soil

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 has also been diminished because the floodwaters killed 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 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 might 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 underwater all summer.

Olson said that in one of his fields, floodwaters carved a 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 Web site of his family's equipment business are striking.

"Anything that the water flowed across has done a lot of damage," Olson said.

The flooding is a byproduct of unexpectedly heavy spring rain 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.

Stagnated soil and damage

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

"There's going to be parts of fields that may never be farmed again or won't be farmed for a couple years," said Clarke McGrath, agronomist with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Besides sand and debris, farmers will have to deal with "flooded field syndrome."

Any time water stands on a field for more than a couple of days, McGrath said, the soil starts to stagnate because of the lost microbes and the weight of the water.

McGrath and other experts said farmers might need to allow weeds to grow on the land or plant a cover crop, such as winter wheat, to get roots back in the soil and help microbes grow. Without doing that, there's a risk that whatever crop is planted on the land won't perform well.

Although the river has dropped dramatically, some land still looks like lakes or river channels. Elsewhere, dry land is littered with boat docks and crumbling homes that floated down from upstream.

Floodwaters swept several feet of soil away from some fields and deposited huge mounds of sand elsewhere.

"It looks like snow drifts," Rob Chatt said about the sand piled 3 to 5 feet deep in his fields north of Herman, Neb. But Chatt's sand drifts won't melt away, so he'll have to use a bulldozer to clear them out.

Chatt said he tried to get a head start on rehabbing the soil by planting rye seed on his fields from an airplane. He hopes enough will sprout to help his fields and give his cattle something to graze on this winter.

Online:

Olson's aerial flood photos, www.leevalley.net.