Author: Phil McCausland / Source: NBC News
SIDNEY, Iowa — Lacey Kiefer has spent the past year learning from her father, David Lueth, how to farm soybeans and corn on 500 acres of valuable river-basin farmland here. Her husband left the Air Force last year after a decade in the military, and they saw farming as a potential future.
Now, those once-fertile acres sit under the waters of the Missouri River, which swelled as part of the massive flooding that inundated the Midwest last weekend.
Sitting in the Silver Spur Bar and Grille at lunchtime Wednesday, Lueth’s lips quivered and his fist trembled after a neighbor showed him an aerial photo of the floodwaters receding from his house and farmland.
Lueth’s family is now staying with friends as they wait for the floodwaters to recede — and reveal whether their hopes for the future remain.
“We’ve done this before,” said Lueth, 61, who is in his 35th year of farming and has seen flooding multiple times in the past. “But I just don’t know if I want to go through it again.”
Floodwaters have devastated farms and rural towns here in the Midwest, forcing people in southwest Iowa to contend with difficult questions about their loyalty to a home they love and the unforgiving floodwaters that seem to strip them of their way of life with growing frequency.
The flash flooding from a combination of warming temperatures, sudden snowmelt and heavy rainfall has been felt from Nebraska through Iowa and down into Missouri. The waters have killed two, burst through a dozen levees on the Missouri River and caused almost $1.4 billion of losses in Nebraska alone, according to the Associated Press. And with climate change an ongoing threat, extreme weather events like this will likely be increasingly common in the future.
Some farmers and local residents fear the unknowns caused by the floodwaters, with many questioning whether they can continue to live and work while battling unpredictable weather and a Missouri River that floods with increasing regularity.
But some also say that it has emboldened them to become louder advocates to get the help they need from politicians to protect their homes — communities that are often forgotten in the national conversation.
“We have to make this in our wheelhouse,” said Jeff Jorgenson, a local farmer and district director for the Iowa Soybean Association, “because we’re working to try to save our community.”
Fewer Iowa farmers expected after flood
At the Silver Spur this week, farmers compared notes and photos to understand the ripple effects of the flood on themselves and their neighbors. Many likened it to the devastating flood in 2011, but with the caveat that the impact of these waters would be much worse and longer lasting.
Some farmers in Fremont County will probably not return to till their soil, many farmers here said.
“Lot of folks won’t be able to continue after this,” said Julius Schaaf, 66, who said 1,500 of his 4,000 acres were currently under water.
Because of rain, changing temperatures and the speed at which the water arrived, many of the gravel roads farmers use here became impassable in the days leading up to the sudden deluge. Most who operate here were unable to save the soybean and corn bushels they’d kept in grain silos. With commodity prices currently at a record low due to a crop surplus and the Trump administration’s trade wars, some farmers had hoped that storing the crops until prices rose would earn them a few more cents per bushel.
In Fremont County alone, local farmers pulled together a quick estimate that the flood affected 28 local producers’ farmland. Of those who stored grain, only three were able to move theirs before the water came and ruined nearly 1.8 million bushels of corn and soybeans.
Much of the grain lost by these Iowa farmers is uninsured, and they estimate that they lost a total of 390,000 bushels of soy and 1.4 million bushels of corn — totaling about $7.3 million in damage to their farm operations. For context, American farmers yielded 14.42 billion bushels of corn and soybeans between September 2017 and August 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
For some, the flooding could mean losing both their 2018 crops and their 2019 crops, because the lingering water stripped topsoil and left behind sand that could delay planting. Most farmers had planned to plant seed in fewer than four weeks.
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