A massive winter flood cracked the Len Small levee wide open and left thousands of acres of Missouri and Illinois farmland damaged. With planting and flood season around the corner, Alexander County, Illinois farmers like Adam Thomas are in limbo.
Thomas drove through his field along the rough and muddy gravel roads. Lodged in the middle of what was once a rich and pristine soybean field was an upended mess of tubes, wheels and hoses from a nearby farmer’s irrigation system.
Nowadays, his farmland in Miller City looks like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. There was sand. Layer upon layer of sand as much as 4 feet deep covered nearly 100 acres. Large sand deposits, fallen trees, and fragments of a damaged road are wreaked havoc on his once fertile farm ground.
Back in January excessive rainfall in the Mississippi River caused a rare winter flood. Floodwaters shattered records, plunging nearly 43,000 acres of land underwater and causing a mile-long hole in the Len Small levee, according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service. After nearly three months, the levee still has a gaping hole.
“As long as there's a hole in that levee, it can put the sand right back where it was,” Thomas said. “There's no point in fixing the roads. There's no point in digging the ditches. There's no point in cleaning anything up, because if you do all that come April it could just put it all right back on it.”
Robert Holmes, the national flood coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey, said much of the sand on the fields came from the bed of the Mississippi River.
“If it has direct connection on the river through the levee opening it's going to pump a tremendous amount of sand out of the main channel [and] right out onto those farm fields,” Holmes said.
Fields today essentially open right onto the river. That could bring water, sand and silt right back onto farm fields this summer. With normal flood season approaching and a chunk of the levee gone Alexander County Engineer Jeff Denny said time’s running out.
“There's just not enough time and enough working conditions, working days to be able to get in and make some sort of repair or do something,” Denny said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it’s placed rocks along the Mississippi River’s bank to prevent it from cutting another channel. As for the levee, there aren’t current plans to fix it.
Now farmers are left to play a game of Russian Roulette. To plant or not to plant? In a good year, farmer Adam Thomas would have planted his soybeans in June and would have expected to make more than $20,000.
“Well, we always have a June rise in the summertime in the rivers,” Thomas said. “And so, because of that we’re going to back our plant dates up to July 1.
Unfortunately, that could damage yields and put his harvest at risk. But this is nothing new for farmers. Back in 2011, farmers along the Missouri River sued the Army Corps of Engineers when major flooding damaged their land. Alexander County farmers are part of a familiar debate about farmland in the floodplain, and who’s responsible for its protection.
“The farmers can't fix it back,” Thomas said. “If the farmers could fix it back, we'd be fixing it back right now. But we just can't do it alone this time. And we need some help.”
As of now, all farmers can do is wait.
