Brownfield

Sweet corn harvest

For nearly everyone on the Brownfield team, our love of agriculture and involvement in it reaches beyond what we do as members of this team.  Take for instance Julie Harker.  It was a typical, hot Saturday in July when her family headed out to Lowell and JoAnn Mohler’s farm to pick sweet corn.  It is an annual event and part of the Grace Episcopal Youth Group fundraiser.  They pick corn donated by Lowell and JoAnn and sell it the next day at church.

Former Brownfielder Lane McConnell who now works at Missouri Department of Agriculture made sure the youth had AgriMissouri bags for proper packaging. 

Lowell Mohler is a former Missouri Department of Ag Director and Missouri Conservation Commissioner.  He is happy with his sweet corn crop and Julie couldn't resist videotaping him as he talked about it. (The youth group picked 8 rows of the regular sweet corn.  They did not pick the Bt corn Lowell talks about in the video.)

Message from Pike County, Illinois

Our good friend Blake Roderick, Executive Director of Pike and Scott County Farm Bureaus and Two Rivers Farm Bureau Foundation sent an update that we were all very pleased to receive.  The news was good this time for the region Blake represents in fighting the 2008 floods.  Julie Harker and Tom Steever spent some time a couple of weeks ago with Blake - on the levees - in west central Illinois.  Blake continued to keep us abreast of the situation as river levels fell. 

Update from Pike County
Wednesday, July 2, 2008:

Monitoring the 54-miles of main-stem Mississippi River levees in the Sny Island Drainage District of Pike County will continue for several more days. River levels crested three times at near record levels during the 2008 flood.

The Mississippi River will be under major flood stage in the next couple of days—points south of US 54 are at or below major flood stage today. All the points along the Sny will be at or below flood stage within a week.

Yellow River flooding

Thanks to Charlie McConnell at FCS Financial for sharing some pictures Jim Maag shot of flooding from Yellow Creek at the east edge of Brookfield, Missouri.  These tractors are in the same field.  One got out.  The other did not.

Unfortunately, sites like this one are not uncommon in many areas of the Midwest this year.  We have a whole slew of flood pictures on the Brownfield website Fighting the 2008 Flood page.

 

High water in NW Missouri

On his way to cover the Livestock Marketing Association meeting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Tom Steever ran into some high water in northwestern Missouri. 

This is a tractor we saw on the way to Sioux Falls.  This was along Hwy. 36  between Macon and St. Joe.  We had to divert about 20 miles because of high water along that route.

Tom

Brownfield's Katie Allen talked to the farmer who owns the tractor in the photo.  You can read her story on the Brownfield website.

From the fields

More rain moving through parts of the Midwest means Brownfield's flood coverage will, unfortunately, continue for some time.

I interviewed a Pioneer agronomist in southern Illinois today who said corn planting wrapped up last week, tailed closely by soybean planting.  As wheat harvest is underway and double crop beans are going in, Scott Eversgerd told me many of the fields in that part of the state could use about an inch of rain.  That's hard to believe when there are many farm fields across the region that have water standing in them, like this one.  Julie Harker took the picture this afternoon on her drive from Columbia to Jefferson City, Missouri, on Highway 63 before the Missouri River bridge.

Farm Bill cheat sheet

Whew. Who has time to read AND comprehend more than 1700 pages of information included in the Food and Energy Security Act of 2008?  So I asked Pete Shinn to put together a "cheat sheet" for me, featuring highlights and talking points.  It is too good not to share with you.  Still, Pete wants to make sure everyone understands this is a brief overview:

"It's a measure of the new farm bill's complexity that the above discussion represents "highlights," and is very, very far from being a comprehensive run-down of the spending, programs and legislative changes that are actually contained within the document, which runs more than 1,700 pages."

Not all river bottoms are flooded

The Brownfield team has done a stellar job of telling the stories of flooding and the impact of adverse weather conditions throughout the Midwest.  Although many acres of cropland have been flooded, there are areas where the crops do NOT have their legs in water and actually look quite good.  Rain does make grain -- unless of course there's just too much of it.

Cornfields in the Missouri River bottoms just outside of Lexington, Missouri were looking pretty good when I drove past them last Sunday afternoon.

High and dry in Cedar Rapids

The sun is shining and there are just a few puffy white clouds in the sky as I write this at my computer on Thursday morning. The birds are chirping and the dogs are running around the lush green back yard. It is hard to imagine that just a little over mile away there is devastation due to the flood of 2008.

It is now a week since the flood waters started rushing into a vast area of Cedar Rapids along the Cedar River. There are those that still talk about the flood of 93, but that is in the history books now as the flood of 2008 is being called a 500 year flood. Until last week Cedar Rapids was a bright and shiny city, but that is no more as mud and trash cover a wide area of downtown and into the low lying neighborhoods. Family owned businesses that had been there for years are filled with icky stuff and the mold is starting to grow on the floors and walls. Many will clean it up or rebuild others say they will close up shop.

Reporting on the floods

From Wisconsin to Iowa, Indiana to Illinois, Missouri to Nebraska and beyond, weather and flooding have been front and center in agricultural news, markets and weather programming on Brownfield Ag News for weeks now.  Having grown up near the Illinois River where my family has farmed for generations, so much of this year is reminiscent for me, personally, of 1993. 

Each morning and throughout the day, the Brownfield Ag News Team works together to cover all aspects of the "Fighting the Floods of 2008." 

Julie Harker and Tom Steever are in either Missouri or Illinois today, covering the fight on both sides of the Mississippi River.  Julie sent back some pictures of efforts underway in Adams County, Illinois and across the river in Hannibal, Missouri.  They arrived in Quincy, Illinois yesterday and will spend the rest of the week with farmers and community members working hard to hold back the mighty Mississippi River from Quincy, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri.

We all know someone who has been personally impacted by these floods.  So many farm kids from the Midwest went off to college and took jobs in other places, but the ties they have to the soil of the home farm remains strong. 

Courtney Yuskis grew up on a farm near Warsaw, Illinois.  She is now Director of the Country Living Association.  Upon learning about the levee break in that area, I emailed her, letting her know she and her family are in my thoughts.  I was saddened to receive her reply:

Unfortunately, about 95% of my family's land will be underwater by tonight. I have been here since Saturday, fighting what was eventually a losing battle. We just took a final drive through the bottoms (about 30,000 acres will be flooded by this break); it's surreal to think that all of those crops will be lost.

This is a personal message and one I would not typically share, but I know there are many others of us who have experienced the same thing - either in 1993 or today.  The amazing thing about farmers and agricultural communities is their ability to pick themselves up and put the pieces back together again. 

Julie Harker sent back some pictures taken Wednesday on the levee in Adams County, Illinois.  In addition to telling their stories through Brownfield Ag News, Julie took shovel in hand to assist in filling sandbags. 

This is what Julie had to say about that experience:

I asked if I could shovel a few bags of sand because I did not do that during the 1993 & ‘95 floods in my home state of Missouri. At that time, I worked behind the scenes at Missourinet, Brownfield’s sister network in Jefferson City. I conducted interviews by telephone, attended Corps briefings, and produced newscasts as those historic floods unfolded.  But I did not get away to help sandbag then.   Not by any stretch did the folks at the Quincy, IL command center NEED me to help shovel last week. They LET me shovel because I asked.  I thank them for letting me help in that small way – three or four bags I believe it was. The sandbagging effort in Quincy (and Pleasant Hill) was amazing - so many, working so hard. I applaud their efforts. 

Weather spells detours and deployments

The adverse weather we've experienced in the Midwest means different things for different people. While the Brownfield Ag News team is telling the weather stories you need and want to hear and read, as individuals, some of us are experiencing a great impact in our daily lives.

For my husband and me, the hay crop that should have been harvest 2 weeks ago is still standing, awaiting a good hay cutting, curing and baling forecast.  My drive to the office has been detoured because the Missouri River has flooded across Highway 179, which is a large leg of my 30-mile drive to the office.

For Pete Shinn, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, it is something else entirely.  In addition to being a member of the Brownfield Ag News Team, Pete is a Lieutenant in the Iowa Air National Guard.  He has been activated and will be a part of the team fighting the flood in eastern Iowa for the next seven days.