Treading Water; For Mississippi Delta's Farmers, Great Flood of 2011 Is Far from Over
This was supposed to be a big year.
Crop prices were up. The weather had cooperated, mostly, in the fall and the spring. Mid-South farmers had their fields ready and were looking to cash in.
In fact, a lot of farmers were depending on 2011's crop to make up for the low prices and bad weather of the past two years.Then the water came.
It crept out of the Yazoo River onto Matt Edgar's farm near Yazoo City, Miss., on Mother's Day weekend. All he could do was watch and "hope for the best." By then, he had planted all of his fields.
Up north in Memphis, the Mississippi River was three miles wide and crowds had gathered in Downtown to get a look at the mammoth, history-making deluge.
"It was going to be an above-average year at worst," Edgar said. "To put it into perspective, our wheat crop was going to be the highest-priced crop we'd ever sold and was the highest-yielding crop we'd ever raised."
Edgar was only able to harvest 150 acres of that high-priced, high-yielding wheat. The remaining 650 acres of it are still underwater. So are hundreds of acres of his soybeans and corn. In all, 75 percent of the crop acres he planted this year were ruined by floodwaters.
He's not alone. Rob Coker also farms around Yazoo City, and around 4,500 acres - or 65 percent of his total cropland - went underwater at some point.
"We really did think we were going to have a very good year, and now we're just going to scrape and try to hope we can break even," Coker said. "It's been a difficult ride; you never know what's going to come with floodwaters. It's happened before, but nothing like this."
In all, floodwaters ruined about 600,000 acres of Mississippi cropland, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Waters ruined 650,000 acres in Tennessee. Overall, the flood washed out about 3.6 million crop acres this year along the Lower Mississippi River.
The flood hit Arkansas farmers the hardest, with 1 million acres destroyed there, according to the Arkansas Farm Bureau. That destruction could have a $500 million effect on Arkansas' economy this year. Agriculture is the state's largest industry segment and accounts for about $16 billion of its economy overall.
An ironic twist - and there are a few with this flood - saved Payneway, Ark., rice farmer Dan Hosman from posting an even bigger loss this year.
Light but weekly rains in April kept him from planting the thousands of acres he farms with his brother, Don, and father, Buddy. So, rain saved them from planting seed and spending hours of work on land that would have been washed away. Some of that land is in the St. Francis Floodway, which syphons water away from nearby Trumann and Marked Tree but doesn't flood every year.
"I've heard about the (flood of 1973) all my life. That was always the bad one around here," Hosman said. "This one beats '73 by a foot or two."
Remnants of white sandbags remain in the yards of just about every house close to Hosman's grainstorage facility at the intersection of highways 63 and 14. Muddy banks, dingy water lines on cars and sheds, and dark, empty fields are the ghosts of the highest water that has come and gone.
Even though the gawkers and cameras have left the banks of the Mississippi and television news crews have packed their waders, a lot of farmland in the Delta remains underwater.
On Thursday, Hosman rumbled his SUV on a graveled levee road to one of his best fields, a flat, 1,500-acre expanse just off of Highway 63. All of it was underwater Thursday, the surface occasionally disturbed by fish feeding below.
The water - about a foot-and-a-half of it - moved slowly along, creating a babbling, hissing white noise as it streamed across an access road on its way, by and by, to the Mississippi River.
"I'll have roads I'll have to rebuild where they've washed out," Hosman said looking over the flooded field. "All of these farms are precision leveled (with GPS systems) so we'll have to go back in there and fine-tune them, so that's more money, too. We'll have washouts, some holes, sand blows and we'll have to deal with all that, too."
It'll be another two or three weeks before Hosman and his family will know where they stand. Yazoo City farmers Edgar and Coker said they'll plant whenever the ground gets dry. But all of them said they'll plant soybeans. The planting season for wheat and corn is too far along, they said. And all of them said they will have to make some kind of a crop.
"We really don't have a choice," Edgar said. "If we don't, we'll have no income for the rest of the year so we have to find another crop."
But that is posing its own challenge. While Edgar and Coker and farmers throughout the Delta wait for some fields to dry, in yet another ironic twist, they're battling a monthlong drought.
Meanwhile, crop insurance adjusters are fanning out to farms all over the Delta. Farmers will get some of their investment back, but likely not enough to carry them over to the next year.
The government has also stepped in with help to just about anyone affected by the floodwaters, tornadoes and other natural disasters that struck this year. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has so far approved more than $5 million in assistance for Tennessee, more than $6.2 million for Mississippi and more than $9.6 million to Arkansas.
The USDA's Farm Service Agency is now providing emergency loans to farmers in counties that have been federally declared disaster areas. The low-interest loans are set to help them recover from production and physical losses of the flood to restore or replace farm-essential property, pay for production costs this year, pay essential family living expenses, reorganize farm operations and refinance certain debts.
Edgar knows what many think of all this.
"Everybody thinks the farmers have got it made and that insurance is going to take care of them and then the government gives us all these handouts, but all of that is definitely not true," he said.
This year's flood has been "disastrous" and that the insurance companies and government would respond the same way to emergency situations with other industries.
Back at Hosman's floodedrice field, he chose reality over philosophy when asked what he thinks about the flood of 2011 in general.
"I think it's June 1st and it's getting late (to plant)," he said with a laugh but without hesitation. "Farming has been a great livelihood and we love it, but, gosh, these last three years have been, well, trying."
- Toby Sells: 529-2742
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"Farming has been a great livelihood and we love it, but, gosh, these last three years have been, well, trying."
Dan Hosman
Payneway, Ark., rice farmer
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