Floods strip Midwest of tons of valuable topsoil

This has not been a good summer for Jim Lankford. His corn crops used to stretch to the White River. Now the river has stretched itself through his crops. The river eroded a new route for itself during June’s flooding, a channel with steep 12-foot banks at the edge of some of Lankford’s corn fields about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The flood spread rocks in other spots, making it look as if Lankford planted soybeans in a gravel road. Elsewhere, silt is piled up like sand dunes and uprooted trees still litter cornfields more than a month after the floods. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen in my life for this area,” the 62-year-old farmer said.

AP reports that the flooding that swamped large areas of the Midwest took with it some of the region’s most valuable resource: soil. Now farmers and environmentalists are at odds over what to do with erosion-prone land — take their chances planting crops on marginal land in hopes of good yields and high grain prices, or plant trees, native grasses, or ground cover that act as a natural flood buffer. The floods may have caused up to $3 billion in crop losses in Iowa and $800 million in crop damage in Indiana, according to estimates from agriculture secretaries in those states. Erosion damage is harder to tally. In Wisconsin, flooding damaged about $2.8 million worth of conservation structures, such as dams, levees, ditches and waterways, said Don Baloun, a farm conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service in Madison, Wisconsin.
Some land in Illinois is still submerged. “It could be fall for some of our counties on the Mississippi River before we see what kind of damage farmers did experience as far as erosion,” said Donald King of Illinois’ USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Erosion robs farmers of the nutrient-rich topsoil their growing plants need. “It takes thousands of years to form one inch of topsoil,” said Jane Hardisty, Indiana’s state conservationist. “Within a day, we lost it. It’s just devastating.” It is also an issue downstream, where sediment diminishes water quality. Scientists think the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — oxygen-depleted water off the Texas-Louisiana coast that can not support kill marine life — is likely to be worse this year partly because of the flood runoff.

States have set up programs to keep their soil.