Iowa Farmer Sees `Years’ of Damage to Corn Crops From Flooding

June 27 (Bloomberg) — Hard work and a bulldozer will help Kim Dummermuth finish planting his corn and soybeans. The rich topsoil lost to floods this month won’t be restored so quickly.

“It will take a few years to get the productive capacity back,” said Dummermuth, taking a break on his northeast Iowa farm to eat one of the sandwiches his wife, Lois, brings him at lunchtime. Today, he plans to clear Turkey River sand out of his cornfield.

The flooding wiped out more than $8 billion of this year’s crops, according to the America Farm Bureau Federation. For at least the next decade, farmland along the Mississippi River and its tributaries may require more fertilizer to make the soil rich enough to maintain yields, said Jerry Hatfield of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That will push up costs. The price of fertilizer rose 69 percent in the past year.

“It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil,” said Hatfield, director of the USDA’s National Soil Tilth Laboratory, a land-management study center in Ames, Iowa. Tilth refers to soil’s suitability for farming. “The floods washed it away in minutes.”

Bloomberg