NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Farmers in Tennessee have problems to deal with in the course of a year, but flooding in July wasn’t one of them – until now.
According to the National Weather Service, a rare surge of the Mississippi River caused by heavy rain in the river’s tributaries in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana earlier in the month has left thousands of acres underwater in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.
Last week, in response to flooding in West Tennessee, State Commissioner of Agriculture Julius Johnson and Deputy Commissioner Jai Templeton, along with state Sen. Ed Jackson (R-Jackson), state Rep. Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley) and USDA Farm Service Agency officials and county leaders, visited Lauderdale and Dyer Counties to get a look at the damage.
Fitzhugh called the flooding, which put tens of thousands of acres of prime Tennessee farmland underwater, unusual.
"This is July, which is very, very late for water in our area. It was really quite unusual to see it at this time of the year," he remarked. "Another thing we saw which is not what we usually see … was a lot of track hoes and that type of (machinery) trying to throw up some levees to try to contain the backwater."
Johnson said even with efforts to build and shore up levees, the pressure of the floodwaters would probably be too great for them to hold back. Also, by the time the waters recede and the land dries out, it probably will be too late for farmers to replant their crops.
"There will be a question whether these farmers will be able to have any crop at all this year," he said. "These are the prime farmlands of West Tennessee, some of the best in the country. Even though they lay low next to the Mississippi River, it’s some of our best, most productive soils."
Johnson said it’s too early to estimate the total economic impact the flood will have on Tennessee, but as soon as that information can be gathered, the state will send a request for the area to be federally declared a disaster so it may qualify for financial aid.
In addition to that aid, farmers hope there will be a review of current insurance coverage in the area, Fitzhugh said. "We need to point out … the inability of these farmers to get the crop insurance that they need in order to plant crop in these particular areas," he said, adding that farmers in the flooded area feel changes made a few years ago in how the area has been rated for insurance coverage doesn’t make sense.
"Some of the areas they couldn’t get insurance for weren’t even underwater, and (in) some of the other areas they can only get minimum insurance, so they’re concerned about how the rating was done."
Johnson explained after a record flood in 2011, the federal crop insurance program reclassified much farmland in the area.
"All they have is a catastrophic kind of coverage. It’s a very weak coverage and doesn’t do what it needs to do to put these farmers in better shape," said Johnson, who plans to write the Risk Management Agency about the concerns farmers have about the insurance reclassification.
"We think they have overreacted. The 2011 storm was a one-in-1,000-years kind of flood event. We think they need to re-look at this and see if they can find something in between the catastrophic coverage and what they have currently available for them. If we don’t produce on these lands, where is that production going to go?
"There’s going to be a lot of impact locally because there will be a lot less jobs at harvest time this year. These counties are heavy agricultural counties. There will be a loss of economic activity this fall," he added.
"To recover from this year will take these producers a long time."
The flood has hurt the state’s milo crop, also known as grain sorghum, an important rotational crop mostly grown in West Tennessee.
The flood also threatens cotton, corn and soybean crops. Soybeans are Tennessee’s leading commodity, valued at nearly $900 million in 2013.
Dyer and Lauderdale counties are in the top five producers of milo in the state, and Dyer leads Tennessee in soybean production, with Lauderdale third on that list, according to state officials.
