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Reuters Exclusive: More than 1 million acres of U.S. cropland ravaged by floods

(Reuters) - At least 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of U.S. farmland were flooded after the “bomb cyclone” storm left wide swaths of nine major grain producing states under water this month, satellite data analyzed by Gro Intelligence for Reuters showed.

Farms from the Dakotas to Missouri and beyond have been under water for a week or more, possibly impeding planting and damaging soil. The floods, which came just weeks before planting season starts in the Midwest, will likely reduce corn, wheat and soy production this year.

“There’s thousands of acres that won’t be able to be planted,” Ryan Sonderup, 36, of Fullerton, Nebraska, who has been farming for 18 years, said in a recent interview.

“If we had straight sunshine now until May and June, maybe it can be done, but I don’t see how that soil gets back with expected rainfall.”

Spring floods could yet impact an even bigger area of cropland. The U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned of what could be an “unprecedented flood season” as it forecasts heavy spring rains. Rivers may swell further as a deep snow pack in northern growing areas melts.

The bomb cyclone of mid-March was the latest blow to farmers suffering from years of falling income and lower exports because of the U.S.-China trade war.

More: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-floods-exclusive/exclusive-more-than-1-million-acres-of-u-s-cropland-ravaged-by-floods-idUSKCN1RA2AW

Farmers intend to plant more corn and less soybeans, but flooding means all bets are off.

Before the massive flooding borne by the bomb cyclone, the nation’s farmers intended to plant 92.8 million acres of corn this year. That would be 4% more (+3.66 million acres) than last year, according to USDA’s Prospective Plantings report issued Friday. That’s more than early estimates presented by USDA at its Outlook Forum; also more than average trade estimates.

Much of the increase comes at the expense of soybean acreage. Farmers intended to plant 84.6 million acres of soybeans, which would be 5% fewer acres (-4.6 million acres) than last year. That’s less than most estimates ahead of the report.

All wheat planted area for 2019 is estimated at 45.8 million acres, down 4% from 2018. This would be the lowest all wheat planted area since records began in 1919, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Again, this is based on surveys before the massive flooding began.

Acreage shift in flood years

Assessing potential impact of what could be historic flooding, the Livestock Marketing

Information Center (LMIC) considered national planting intentions and actual seeded acreage for the last two primary flood years of 2011 and 1993. Analysts remind that in 1993, devastating flooding during the growing season followed spring flooding.

“In 2011, the corn area planted was about 240,000 acres below the prospective indication (down 0.3%), while soybean acreage was down 1.6 million acres (down 2.0%),” say LMIC analysts in the most recent Livestock Monitor. “In 1993, the difference (actual plantings minus prospective survey) was a corn drop of about 3.25 million acres (-4.3%), and a soybean increase of 785,000 acres (up 1.3%)…Note that the balance of this year’s Midwest crops could be different than those years due to relative crop prices, etc.”

Current forecasts suggest flooding this year could be worse.

More: https://www.beefmagazine.com/market-reports/flooding-jumbles-planting-outlook

‘Breaches Everywhere’: Midwest Levees Burst, and Tough Questions Follow....

Hundreds of miles of levees in the Midwest have been overwhelmed by the floods, leaving “Swiss cheese” infrastructure and reigniting a flood control debate.

The flooding of the last month has exposed the vulnerabilities in a levee system that is now so full of holes many here ruefully describe it as “Swiss cheese.” With dozens of costly breaks across Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and nearby states, the floods have left large areas of the Midwest without even cursory flood protection. And with the fear of more floods in the coming years — and perhaps even the coming weeks — many people said living and farming near the water might not be viable much longer without major changes.

“We can’t keep this up and make a living,” Mr. Peters said last week after trying to find a path to his submerged farm in a motorboat.

On the river-specked Midwestern prairie, the thousands of miles of levees are an insurance policy against nature’s whims that, at their best, keep cropland and towns dry, floodwaters at bay and the agriculture-driven economy churning. But the levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, never designed to withstand the river levels seen in the last decade.

More: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/us/midwest-floods-levees.html

Historic Midwest floods could threaten drinking water

More than 1 million private wells that supply drinking water in mostly rural parts of the Midwest could face the risk of contamination from floodwater, posing a health concern that could linger long after the flooding subsides.

Major flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and several smaller waterways has inundated states in the middle of America, from the Canadian border south to Kentucky. The National Weather Service has warned that with snowmelt in northern states only beginning, the threat of additional flooding persists well into spring.

The high water and swift current carries raw sewage from overburdened treatment plants, animal waste and pesticides from farm fields, and spilled fuel.

“Whatever was on the land is in the water now,” said Steve May, assistant chief of the Missouri Bureau of Environmental Epidemiology.

Contaminated water can carry bacteria such as E. coli that can cause gastrointestinal illness, reproductive problems and neurological disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infants, young children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable.

The National Ground Water Association, a trade group for the industry that includes well systems, said there are 1.1 million private wells in 300 flooded counties in 10 states: Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Kentucky.

Stagnant water could linger for days or even weeks even as flooding starts to subside in hard-hit areas, raising the risk that some of it will get into wells by flooding over the top, seeping through cracks or as a result of other flaws in the well structure.

Liesa Lehmann, private-water section chief for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said her state has an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 private wells. The National Ground Water Association said the current flood poses a risk to more than 280,000 Wisconsin wells, the most in any state.

“Anyone who has a private well within a flood plain area of a major river, those wells are certainly going to be vulnerable to contamination,” Lehmann said.

https://www.apnews.com/4c0a6208ba5b418da5d88b4c67c138e1

States affected:

•Illinois
•Iowa
•Indiana
•Nebraska
•Missouri
•Kansas
•Wisconsin
•Minnesota
•South Dakota
•Kentucky

https://www.axios.com/flooding-midwest-could-threaten-drinking-water-dcc33ecd-eb8c-4a04-91dd-3efad3283a59.html

Catastrophic Midwestern flooding costing farmers $1 billion and counting

Catastrophic flooding across the central Midwest has wiped out livestock and probably will prevent farmers from planting this spring.

Thousands of livestock were killed, and many more are expected to die from lack of food and water. The Nebraska Beef Cattlemen's Association alone estimated the lost livestock was worth $400 million.

"The magnitude of this is hard to comprehend," said Steve Nelson, the president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau. "This flood has covered 70 percent of our state. I've talked with lots of [cattle farmers] who moved their cattle to places that had never been flooded before, and yet they lost their cattle."

More: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019/03/21/Catastrophic-Midwestern-flooding-costing-farmers-1-billion-and-counting/2911553186021/?rc_feat=1

Anyone heard or seen something in the form of an official response to all of this other than a few photo ops and "thoughts and prayers" by members of the administration ?

It is difficult for me to watch this.
www.youtube.com/embed/CUA2VgLrgn0?t=518

With a determination
to accomplish
The highest welfare
for all sentient beings
Who surpass even a
wish-granting jewel
I will learn to hold
them supremely dear.

@socal2 Think this might be a good time to try out that theory about the Central Valley with the three growing seasons and all being able to supply the country's food needs?

Probably could use that surplus supply as well.

I forget how are they fixed for cattle ? Going to be a shortage of those really quick.

HEYYOU says

How many of these flooded are socialist Republicans that are going to want their Socialist govt. to give them hardworking taxpayers cash that don't live in flood plans.

All of them...especially the yuuggee Megafarms.

Pay libbies more tax money so they can tell us how when and where we are all gonna die.

BlueSardine says

Pay libbies more tax money so they can tell us how when and where we are all gonna die.

No need, A.I. can do that for you - really really accurately - that is for another thread though but thanks for the comment - I knew someone sooner rather than later would try to turn this political.

Since you wanted to go there - enlighten the forum on the wonderful response to all of this by Team Trump

@HEYYOU

The canary in the coal mine so to speak is the mass extinction underway in the insects on this planet.

https://www.newsweek.com/insect-extinction-risk-consequences-natural-world-1334703

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/11/18220082/insects-extinction-bological-conservation

Let's everyone pretend nothing is happening and should someone say something, denounce them as purveyors of fake news, alarmists, globalists, commies, SJWs, anything else that comes to mind but do not acknowledge reality in any way shape form or manner - ever.

Republicans do not have receive "socialist" handouts and bailouts.

Those transfers of funds are necessary for the national security interests of the country and as such are patriotic in nature.

Biblical Anxieties by James Howard Kunstler

The sore beset people of this land may be good and goddam sick of politics, RussiaGate, and Trump-inspired social strife, but they may soon have something more down-to-earth to worry about: Biblical floods and plagues.

Media hysteria around the Mueller Report has nearly eclipsed news of historic flooding in the midwest that has already caused $3 billion in damage to farms, homes, livestock, and infrastructure. With spring rainfall already at 200 percent of normal levels, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement in late March saying, “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

More to the point, two major western dams show disturbing signs of potential failure that may bring on unprecedented disasters. The Oroville Dam on the Feather River north of Sacramento — the highest earthen dam in the US — nearly blew out in February 2017 when record rains damaged the main spillway, threatening to send a 30-foot wall of water downstream towards California’s capital and towns along the way. When that spillway was closed to assess the damage, which was significant, the secondary emergency spillway was opened for the first time since the dam was built in 1968. It too started disintegrating and before long Lake Oroville began flowing over the top of the dam itself. The state had to order evacuation of 188,000 people in three counties. Frantic efforts to drop sandbags from helicopters stabilized the damage and, luckily, the rain stopped.

Subsequent lawsuits against the state’s Department of Water Resources revealed shoddy maintenance, theft of equipment, and poor record keeping. Now, two years later, new cracks have appeared in the repaired Oroville Dam main spillway. The Sierra Nevada snowpack stands at 153 percent above average, and the National Weather Service predicts that weak El Nino conditions with above-average Pacific Ocean temperatures are likely to produce above-average rainfall this spring along with the snowpack melt.

The Fort Peck Dam on the upper Missouri River in Montana is likewise troubling experts watching a record snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. It too is an earthen dam — the world’s largest by volume — filled with hydraulic slurry. Because it is located on the flat high plains, the dam is extremely long, running 21,000 feet — about four miles — from end to end. Behind it is a reservoir that is the fifth-largest man-made lake in the nation.

Concern is rising because the coming snow melt coincides with unusually active seismic activity around the Yellowstone Caldera, one of the world’s super-volcanos. The slurry construction of the dam inclines it to liquification when the ground shakes. Failure of the Fort Peck dam would send the equivalent of a whole year’s flow of the Missouri River downstream in one release that could potentially wash away the other five downstream dams in the Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System, along with every bridge from Montana to St. Louis, an unimaginable amount of farm and town infrastructure, and several nuclear power installations. It would be the greatest national disaster in US history. Just sayin’.

A shy, science-nerd correspondent writes: “Epidemiologists speculate that a flooding event in Central Asia steppes triggered the 1347 Eurasian plague outbreak. Rumors of a mass human die-off in India reached Europe in the mid-1340’s. The Mongols besieging the coastal city of Trebizond on the shore of the Black Sea catapulted plague infested corpses over the city walls and Italian merchant ships fleeing Trebizond carried the infestation to Genoa which foolishly permitted the dying crew to land…. Rodents hosting plague spreading fleas typically inhabit arid grassland regions such as the Great Plains of America and the semi deserts of California and New Mexico. The current flooding of the American Mid-West and the mass dumping of flood tainted wheat, corn and soybeans will likely spark a rodent population explosion in the region, which in the context of rat-swarming homeless encampments may yield a 1347 repeat event in North America during the 2020s. What happened before can happen again.”

The homeless camps around Los Angeles have turned up cases of other medieval-type diseases typical of human settlements before public sanitation became a standard feature of civilized life: Many are spread through feces (as well as drug use): Hepatitis A, Typhus, shigellosis (or trench fever, spread through body lice), and tuberculosis. Gawd knows what is coming across the border into America’s proudly leading “sanctuary state.” Wait for it. Just sayin’.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/biblical-anxieties/

More on Flood Control: The Missouri River, the Levees, and the Gavins Point and Spencer Dams

Alert reader DG threw the following article from Richard Oswald in The Daily Yonder over the transom: “Letter from Langdon: 40 Feet High and Rising.” DG comments:

It’s a heart-breaking, vivid description of what happened and is happening now to a farmer in what he had thought was land above the Nebraska/Missouri River floodplains….

Texas never really left me in important ways, so Osborne’s plaints may have struck a deeper chord in me than a “regular” urbanite. I wept. As we go into 2020 politics (did we ever leave ’16?) and some form of the GND, this climate-cum-political catastrophe may loom higher than anything AOC or Trump has to say.

You might wish to read the article in full.

This post, however, will, much like the Missouri once did and is still trying to do, meander through three waypoints that seem to illuminate the flood control situation on the Missouri (which seems to me to be too complex to assign blame, based on the level of effort I was able to put into research for this post).

These waypoints are the levees, the dams, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which has the major role (though not complete) in managing the river system. I’ll put quotes from Oswald in italics, and then comment on them.

Cited in the above: 40 Feet High and Rising: https://www.dailyyonder.com/letter-langdon-40-feet-high-rising/2019/03/27/31094/

More in the main article including:

The Levees

The Dams

The Corps of Engineers

Conclusion

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/more-on-flood-control-the-missouri-river-the-levees-and-the-gavins-point-and-spencer-dams.html

Flooded farmers to eat cost of damaged grain in storage

Hundreds of farmers may be out of luck trying to recuperate losses after last month’s historic floods in the Midwest. Millions of bushels of grains were destroyed in more than 800 on-farm storage bins – mostly in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa – and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Under Secretary Bill Northey recently told Reuters that, under current laws and disaster aid programs, there’s nothing the U.S. government can do to help.

The USDA has no policy to compensate farmers for damaged crops in storage, Northey said. It’s a problem never before seen on this scale. Part of the reason is that U.S. farmers have never stored so much of their harvests until now. It’s been happening because of years of oversupplied markets, low prices and the latest blow of lost sales from the U.S. trade war with China – previously their biggest buyer of soybean exports.

In 2018 the USDA made $12 billion in aid available to farmers who suffered trade-war losses, without needing Congressional approval. The department has separate programs that partially cover losses from cattle killed in natural disasters, compensate farmers who can't plant crops due to weather, and help them remove debris left in fields after floods.

However, the USDA has no program to cover the catastrophic and largely uninsured stored-crop losses from the widespread flooding, triggered by the “bomb cyclone” that hit the region in mid-March. Congress would have to pass legislation to address the harvests lost in the storm, according to Northey.

“It’s not traditionally been covered,” Northey also told Reuters. “But we’ve not usually had as many losses.”

Indigo Ag, an agriculture technology company, identified 832 on-farm storage bins within flooded Midwest states. They held an estimated 5 to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans – worth between $17.3 million to $34.6 million – that may have been damaged in the floods.

More: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/weather/flooded-farmers-to-eat-cost-of-damaged-grain-in-storage