Why would river silt damage the croplands “for years?” Is this just political hogwash, or is there something behind it? I read another article (WSJ I think) that quoted a farmer saying they’d still plant this year. And wasn’t the flooding of the Nile that historically responsible for that area’s rich agriculture?
Basically, I would have thought river silt/mud would enrich croplands, not hurt them.
Just off the top of my head, but the Nile had not had decades of industrial pollutants dumped into it when it was the source of Egyptian farming.
And I am not very familiar with modern American industrial farming, but I must presume that soil modification and chemical adjustments would be thrown off by having raw silt deposited on processed fields.
This is just God’s way of telling ConAgra to piss off. DrF is likely right. Modern agribusiness has so raped the soil that it takes a careful balance of artificial fertilizers to make it as productive as it is. All the crap coming down river will really mess that up.
I think it’s the depth of the silt/sand - normal flood/ebb cycles are probably beneficial long-term - but I’d imagine that the amount held behind the levees is more than a normal spring overflow. I grew up in the Minnesota river valley - the farmers with river bottom land always figured the years they lost to floods were made up for the increased yields when they managed to harvest.
But those farmers are probably going to lose this entire season (I’d imagine a lot of them have already planted - that’s a lot of time/money down the drain for them). Sitting behind the levee all these years - they’re not used to dealing with floods.
I go into the office fairly early- listened to the farm report this morning and “Farmer Dave” said the problem is that the flooding dumps too much sand on the field. I remember the great floods of '93 in the St. Louis area and heard the flooding actually cleaned out years and years of pesticides and chemicals-
I’m not familiar with the soil specifics of that particular area but there’s a possibility too that the topsoils the farmers don’t want silted were never deposited by overbank/flood processes in the first place, that they were the product of the organic erosion of outcropping shales and/or many centuries of forest and grassland growth and decay and that they’re superior in their potential yield to the medium provided by flooding.
River ‘silt’ is a lot of things. It’s full of nutrients from upstream biological decay. It’s also, (note the similarity in words) full of ‘salt’. Not nearly at a concentration like seawater, but too much will damage soil fertility.
This is what happened to the Sumerians. They irrigated their fields with huge canal works bringing in river water, and over hundreds of years their wheat grew less and less, and was then replaced by barley, until the fields were too salted to even grow that. And the center of middle eastern civilization moved a few hundred miles upriver to Babylon, where it hadn’t happened yet. To this day, the cities of ancient Sumer in southeastern Iraq are desert wastelands.
The two main reasons have already been mentioned, which are 1) contaminants such as pesticides/herbicides and overflow from sanitary sewage systems and 2) overburden of sand/silt.
Many pesticide/herbicides bind to soil particles and thus hang around for a really long time.
Regardless of whether they’ve planted or not (in some areas it’s not warm enough yet), they have to be able to work the land also. You’re not going to be able to get a tractor back out on that land for weeks. It’s my understanding that if they can’t get back in to the fields by mid-June they won’t get a crop this year.
Sidenote: I also hear that crop insurance only applies if you’ve already planted.
Farmland is not just land. There is infrastructure such as buildings, fences, irrigation lines, drainage lines etc. Those are not things you want to get silt in.
River silt is often a suspension and the particles are so fine that they fill in the pores in the soil, stopping oxygen and water getting into the soil. That can be an ongoing problem, since every irrigation cycle washes the silt into the pores. There is no fast solution, you basically just have to keep working the soil til the structure re-establishes.
River silt is often anoxic, and hence acid. Once again, no fast solution, you just have to keep liming the soil until the organic material oxidises fully.
Soils ain’t soils. Different crops prefer different soil types in terms of structure and chemistry. This has nothing to do with the big bad “Corporations”, it’s a simple fact of biology. While the silt may be fertile that does not mean that it is optimal for sowing seeds into. The fact that it only forms a horizon a foot or so deep compounds a problem because you can’t sow plants that favour the silt because they will be confined to the top few inches of the profile, and you can’t sow plants that favour the underlying soil because they will struggle as seedlings. You can plough to try to turn the silt into the soil and find a crop that will tolerate the blend. That is expensive if you are set up for strawberries and find that the new soil is best suited to carrots since you need to change all your equipment, find new markets etc. Then in years to come you need to change back again.
Crop insurance. Don’t be morons and actually pay for it. Part of the cost of doing business.
Right up along there with dont go to war in southeast asia, dont tease tigers and don’t build a house in a flood plain if you don’t want it washed away.
Can we try dealing in facts rather than hyperbole and inflamatory rhetoric?
You know the rhetoric typical of ecoterrorists who think African children should starve because they don’t like the smell of fertiliser in their backyards.
Standard crop insurance does not cover civil unrest and other deliberate acts. Given the extraordinary circumstances and the pre-meditated act causing the flood, I would be astonished if any insurance policy in the world would cover it. At the very least you would probably have to sue the insurance company to get your payment. It’s just so bizarre it’s hard to see how it could be covered in a standard policy.
Multi-peril crop insurance in the United States is subsidized and reinsured by the federal government. If the government were to blow up the levees with one hand and deny insurance coverage with the other, there would be some real civil unrest.
slight hijack (as I think the OP has been answered)
I live about 60-70 miles from where the levee was blown up.
I was inside last night and the house shook (I thought it was an earthquake). I didn’t hear the blast (had the TV and dishwasher on) but definitely felt it.
Would have felt the shaking first? or Heard it first (~12 minutes)?
rich agricultural soil takes time to form. it could recover from pure inundation (just flooding) but combining the effects of erosion of farm soil and deposition of sit will likely destroy it.
That made me think of another point - different soils are going to react differently to the silt deposited. Some soils are acidic, some are alkaline, some have fat clays in them, etcetera.
actually the long-term issue is not silt deposition on farmlands. you can repair those except those really buried more than a meter. the real problem is sitation of rivers and canals in a river system. note: farms tend to be eroded while rivers tend to be silted. if a river is overly-silted its capacity is reduced so it can’t hold that much floodwater, which increases flooding onto the plains.
