Freed Roger wrote:
IMADreamer wrote:
33anda3rd wrote:
Not a good winter for famers.If you read that entire piece you will not see the phrases "climate change" or "global warming."
Global warming or not (I of course know global warming is real) 2018 was bad for farmers, 2019 is going to be catastrophic. There is so much water to come down the rivers this year it's going to be insane. We are already behind on field work because the fall and winter were so wet. This is the case everywhere in the midwest. There are many farms with the 2018 crop still in the field. We are basically just expecting to be flooded this year. We've done a ton of work to our levee system here to beef it up, but when predictions of "higher than 93" get thrown around you can just bet it's a loss.
If we get flooded we are done. Not bankrupt but we are getting out. With this administration there's basically no hope of any actual relief or help in any real meaningful way. Plus the environmental groups already make things like improving your flood fighting techniques impossible. So we will be getting it from the far left and the far right. It's basically time to say [expletive] it.
It's funny, all over the internet Democrats are cheering the farmers plight this year saying we all deserve it. The ironic thing is every one of the farms that go out of business gets bought up by a much larger corporate farm. Which the democrats cry and [expletive] about.
Honest question -What improved flood fighting techniques are being limited?
And why worry about democrats on the internet, when dems have very little power in real world govt.
Just speaking from personal experience. We have been trying to get the river dredged basically my entire life. There was a minor effort one summer that did clean some of the channel. Basically they are letting the river fill up with silt. Then to cater to shipping traffic they use dams to keep the river level up. So much so they raised many of the main dikes on the dams here. The dam, two miles from our farm is two feet higher than when I was a kid. Two feet may not sound like much, but when the river is up on the levee running bank to bank it's a hell of a lot of water. It's puts a ton of hydraulic pressure on the whole drainage system meaning we get massive seepage under ground from the river making our fields wet and muddy. Dredging is of course expensive and the farmers here have been willing to foot the bill ourselves but we can't get past the environmentalist and the corp of engineers.
Two is raising the levees. Again the farmers in our district have offered to pay, but the problem is a higher levee for us means someone else might get flooded instead of us. Not really our fault they won't keep their house in order, but whatever.
The next and more radical solution after 93 was farmers along the river offered to give up some ground to move the levee back 100 yards into their fields. Estimates were that this would have lowered river levels a few feet, which would have been enough to save the district from the flood.
Where we have made progress is we were able to fund new pumps for our pump stations. Since the flood plain is leveed in order to get water out during high river situations or heavy rain events it has to be pumped out. A decade long battle finally let us modernize and increase pumping capacity. Paid for by every local land owner to the tune of 200-400 dollars an acre depending on your elevation. Cost us nearly a million, but it's worth it to get the water off our land.
To put in perspective, I think only around 1500 people live in the drainage district here but revenue off corn alone is over 100 million dollars out of the district. Our local economy greatly depends on that 150k acres staying dry during a flood and there are ways to do it, but we just aren't allowed to.
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