March 23, 2019

Floods could affect midwest farmland for decades

Earther -The Midwest floods continue to be a slow-moving disaster. Towns, farms, and infrastructure are still underwater in Nebraska, and water will take months to work through the vast network of rivers, creeks, and streams that drain the Upper Midwest into the Gulf of Mexico.

The damage to the region could last much longer than that, though. It could require years to rebuild infrastructure, but the real challenge will be restoring the region’s greatest resource, the reason there are so many farms there in the first place: its soil.

“Basically what it’s going to do is going to erode the most productive topsoil,” Mahdi Al-Kaisi, a soil and water specialist with Iowa State’s extension program, told Earther. “This is why we need to think about climate change more seriously. That’s become very destructive to this whole system and put a lot of stress on these surfaces.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The first thing needed to rebuild top soil in the midwest is to stop ploughing fields. Return the land to the bison and elk that built those soils and the native peoples who managed those soils for the bison for thousands of years. Modern agriculture is madness.

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