CHARLESTON, Mo. — This time last year, Roy Presson was gearing up to plant corn and harvest wheat from the 2,300 acres he farms in the Missouri bootheel. Within a matter of a few weeks, though, that was all washed away.

Thanks to record snowmelt to the north and record rainfall in the Midwest, the Missouri and Mississippi river basins became giant lakes instead of productive farmland.

“It’s still a little early for us to put in corn, but what a difference a year makes; that’s for sure,” Presson said. “Thankfully, my land’s in pretty good shape. Other than a little scouring that we had, there was minor damage.”

“Minor” wouldn’t describe the damage to most farmland within the 133,000-acre Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, a wide area south of where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers converge in Cairo, Ill. Within the five counties in the floodway, the USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) – which operates the Federal Crop Insurance Corp. – paid $46.6 million in indemnities to farmers in New Madrid, Mississippi, Scott, Stoddard, Pemiscot and Dunklin counties during 2011.

Crop insurance payments totaled $377 million just in Missouri, and exceeded a record $10 billion nationally last year, said Bill Murphy, RMA administrator. “I’ve been with the program for 30 years, and I don’t remember a year like this before,” he said.

Neither do many meteorologists or farmers – or residents of Cairo, who saw their city threatened by floodwaters until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fought legal challenges to blow up part of the Birds Point levee and inundate the 133,000-acre floodway. The move led to almost immediate relief against Cairo’s seawall; damage to the city was limited.

But farmers such as Presson and Eddie Marshall, who has about 8,000 acres in Mississippi County, witnessed most of their wheat crops and chances at corn last year get flooded. They are hopeful the rest of this spring stays dry, although many of the ditches throughout the floodway are in need of significant cleaning in the coming weeks.

“It’s not being done as quickly as it should have been,” Marshall said. “We could have big rains and a big river, and in two weeks’ time we could be where we were last year.”

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which administers the Emergency Watershed Protection Program, has budgeted about $35 million to repair ditches throughout the Missouri area, said Mark Nussbaum, an NRCS engineer in Jackson, Mo.

“The only way people can live in the bootheel is because of quality drainage,” Nussbaum said. “The drainage has to be there before anything else.”

Following the massive flooding of the area, some 140 miles of ditches were filled with up to eight feet of dirt, sand and debris, Nussbaum said.

Presson was able to plant about 1,000 acres of beans last year, once the water receded in June, and many farmers were able to salvage some measure of bean crop as well. “But we’re certainly not looking forward to any kind of similar experience,” Presson said. “We hope we never see that again.”