Midwest Farmers Suffer After Floods: ‘I Got My Life in This Ground’

From the top of a lookout point on a clear day here, Joe Keithley could see the Missouri River spill over its banks into three states: Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. Underwater farmland stretched to the horizon in all directions. He used binoculars to zoom in on 1,700 acres of his family farm in Missouri. “Looks like one of our grain bins is tipped over,” said Keithley, 57. “Damn it,” he muttered under his breath.Midwestern states have been battered with intensive flooding since mid-March. Rain and warm temperatures melted the snow from an unseasonably cold and snowy winter in some areas, but the frozen ground couldn’t soak up the water.The wet weather overwhelmed the Missouri River and its tributaries that run like vines through the Midwest and Plains. Levies cracked open, and bloated waterways pushed out into the river bottoms.Blocks of ice bigger than pickup trucks jammed the downstream system, cutting up roads and the approaches to bridges. Similar conditions caused flooding from Minnesota down to Louisiana along the Mississippi River.And as farmers and rural residents worried, lawmakers in statehouses around the Midwest began to wrestle, again, with funding and policies to address the disaster. Intensive flooding will continue to happen, and states will have to figure out what to do about it.