Source:
New York TimesNEWHALL, Iowa — Here, in some of the best soil in the world, the stunted stalks of Dave Timmerman’s newly planted corn are wilting in what sometimes look more like rice paddies than the plains, the sunshine glinting off of pools of collected water. Although time is running out, he has yet to plant all of his soybean crop because the waterlogged soil cannot support his footsteps, much less heavy machinery.
Mr. Timmerman’s small farm has been flooded four times in the past month by the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Cedar River which overflowed its banks at a record 31 feet last week, causing catastrophic damage in nearby Cedar Rapids and other eastern Iowa towns and farmsteads.
“In the lean years, we had beautiful crops but they weren’t worth much,” Mr. Timmerman said, surveying his farm, which his family has tended since his great-great-grandfather. “Now, with commodity prices sky high, mother nature is throwing us all these curve balls. I’m 42 years old and these are by far the poorest crops I’ve ever seen.”
-snip-
For Mr. Timmerman and the thousands of other farmers who have seen their fields turn to floodplains, the rain and flooding could not have struck at a worse time, and their plight extends far beyond the Midwest.
-snip-
At a moment when corn should be almost waist-high here in Iowa, the country’s top-producing corn state, more than a million acres have been washed out and destroyed.
Beyond that, agriculture experts estimate that 2 million acres of soy beans have been lost to water, putting the state’s total grain loss at 20 percent so far, with the threat of more rain to come.
“The American farmer, we feed the world,” Mr. Timmerman said. “We’re going to be short on corn and we’re going to be short on soybeans.”
He continued, “It’s heart-wrenching.”
While Mr. Timmerman feels the weight of the situation on his own bottom line — he had just saved enough to upgrade from a 6-row planter to a 16-row version and splurged on his first new tractor — he also feels the weight of the world as he ponders his output under the wide skies of Benton County, an idyllic landscape that could rival a movie set with its picture-perfect backdrops of big red barns.
Jim Fawcett, a crop specialist at the Iowa State University’s agricultural extension service, has been hosting emergency meetings with farmers around the state. With standing water comes concerns about manure storage, pollution, livestock safety, soil erosion, mold and fungus and other plant diseases.
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/16midwest.html?hp
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
