Flooded Iowa farms may be self-inflicted

Mass monoculture agriculture is biting farmers in the butt for getting too cozy with Big Ag.

Kamyar Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and … Cedar Falls City Council member … suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

Many Iowans, whether farmers or not, don’t want to think, or talk, about the idea. But Enshayan isn’t alone:

“I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event,” said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. “We’re farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water.”

Also, both corn and soybeans have shallow roots.

Of course, that means when major floods do come, they eat away more soil, because you corn and beans can’t hold it in place well.

That, in turn, sediments up rivers. Which, then, back up flood waters.

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