The Flooding Mississippi Upsets America’s Breadbasket

ONE of the major floods of American history has struck the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

For the Mississippi to reach flood stage at springtime is not unusual. Its system of tributaries drains the vast, well-watered, fertile plains stretching all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian range. Nevertheless, this year’s flood is different, seriously different.

It has completely upset what might be called ‘the breadbasket of America.’ Large quantities of grain, vegetables, meat and dairy products have poured from this region for generations. The year 1973 was earlier predicted to be the largest harvest year in its history.

But not now. How did it happen? What exactly does it mean for you?

Cause of the Flood

A peculiar weather pattern set the river on its record-breaking swell. Starting last October, a superabundance of rain showered down on the U.S. south and midwest.

In March the state of Mississippi alone registered a 218-percent increase in rainfall over the same month a year earlier. Memphis, Tennessee, had rain on 65 of the first 106 days of the year.

The Mississippi River slowly rose and reached record heights in several places. In April it broke a two-hundred-year-old record at St. Louis when it crested at over forty-three feet.

But not just size made this year’s flood different. A spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says: “This year’s flood has given us a long sustained high water period rather than a quick peak and fall.” Damage during this long flooding has been widespread.

Extent of the Immediate Damage

In place after place along the river and its tributaries homes and farm buildings were totally covered with floodwaters. Earth-mound levees and dikes washed away. Whole cities​—like Cairo, Illinois—​looked like islands set apart by a sea of rolling muddy water. Understandably, one veteran of many Mississippi rampages calls the 1973 flood “the granddaddy of them all.”

So far, property damage from the flood has been calculated to be at least 500 million dollars. Over twenty persons have died, some 35,000 have been driven from their homes. Figures as to how much land was actually inundated vary from eleven to over twenty million acres.

What is surprising is that the huge amounts of water did not cause more damage than they did. Why was this?

Why Damage Was Not Greater

The Mississippi flood-control system constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi River Commission functioned well, apparently without a single break. In May, a Commission spokesman estimated that damage without the project would have been fourteen times as great.

This 2,000-mile-long flood-control system was begun along the Mississippi after the record flood of 1927, in which over 300 persons perished. It has cost over one million dollars per mile to construct. When the Mississippi River outgrows its normal banks this system keeps the river within a man-made channel.

However, the 1973 success of the flood-control network also seems to have created at least part of the flooding, but in other areas. The Mississippi became so full of water that no more could pour into it. Water, as a consequence, backed up along the tributaries. State, county and private levees, unable to handle the overload, broke and flooded the surrounding land.

Of course, the federal levee system would not have functioned without hardworking people to take care of it. They, too, helped to keep damage down. Holes in the system, for example, had to be plugged in emergency measures. Near the small town of Nairn, Louisiana, work crews braced a weakening levee by dumping more than 300 junked automobiles and thousands of tons of rock into it.

Volunteers all along the river and its tributaries also responded to countless calls to fill millions of sandbags for temporary dikes restraining the water. Other volunteers, young and old, labored long hours, often without food or sleep, alongside National Guardsmen and Marines in rescue operations or trying to save homes or prominent buildings from the water.

Many lives were also spared because of orderly evacuations of people from endangered areas. In addition to caring for their own families, elders in the congregations of Jehovah’s witnesses saw to it that fellow Witnesses were safe.

Thus, at Morgan City, Louisiana, it was learned that nearby floodgates might be opened to release pressure on a weak dam, flooding the basin where they lived. The presiding overseer tells what action the elders took:

“About two weeks before the gates were opened, the elders, anticipating this possibility, met with their assistants and other concerned brothers to discuss evacuation plans and made transportation assignments for the nearly one-third of the congregation that did not have automobiles. Each neighborhood study conductor and his assistant were to aid those in their own group to evacuate.”

On Tuesday morning, April 17, the floodgates were opened. Rains had also started again the day before. Flash flooding occurred all over Morgan City. The congregation went ahead with the celebration of the Lord’s Evening Meal after 6 p.m. But thereafter, they executed their evacuation plans.

Most of the Witnesses were then cared for in the homes of members of the nearby Lafayette congregation. Baton Rouge congregations sent financial aid to Lafayette to help with expenses.

Among the most devastating damage caused by the flood was the upset to farmland. This damage will have long-range consequences.

Long-Range Effects on America’s Breadbasket

So serious is the situation that the Memphis (Tennessee) Press-Scimitar says: “Agriculture officials warn of crop famine possibilities.”

The rains and flooding dealt farmers a ‘double-barreled’ blow. Last fall’s rain meant that the harvest could not be completed. Now, this year, farmers have been too busy fighting the water to plant crops.

Just how much yield will the farmer get this year? The precise amount, of course, remains to be seen. Yet, consider:

Corn should be planted during May. But fields were still under several feet of water at mid-month. Only about one percent of Missouri’s corn was in the ground in early May. An observer says: “It is a frightening thing to drive by field after field of the richest bottomland in the United States and see nothing but corn stobs from last year sticking out of either the water or soggy fields.”

Each day that the planting is delayed the amount of the yield is greatly reduced. Further, because of the delay, many farmers resort to rapid-growing ‘short-term’ corn, which usually yields less per acre than the full-season variety.

Other field crops will also suffer. Rice production in Arkansas, the leading rice state, will no doubt be sharply curtailed. Sugarcane production will be down.

Many acres of cotton have also been affected. Most people think of cotton as only a clothing crop, but, of each 1,500 pounds of picked cotton, approximately 1,000 pounds is food for human use or for livestock. From the 1,000 pounds of seed come cotton-seed oil, cotton-seed meal or cake and cotton-seed hulls. Noted the Arkansas Democrat: “Rain May Be Fall of King Cotton. Federal officials predict that new rainfall in the flooded Mississippi Valley could mean the death knell for cotton crops on the inundated farms of Mississippi and Louisiana.”

Many farmers plan to replace their regular crops with soybeans. These can be planted later in the season and draw high prices. Yet, the president of the American Soybean Association warns that over-planting could result in a sudden drop in soybeans’ market price, in which case the farmers would get reduced returns.

At the same time the American National Cattleman’s Association estimates that 250,000 head of mature cattle have been killed by the Mississippi flooding or in unseasonable snowstorms elsewhere in the United States. Hog production is also off because of muddy fields.

To further complicate matters, the raging Mississippi has kept fertilizer shipments from reaching farmers. The fertilizer shortage, says Missouri agronomist P. G. Stryker, is “frustrating already frustrated farmers.”

Then there is the gasoline shortage. Petroleum suppliers say there may be a sudden rush on existing fuel supplies in farm areas as the flood starts to dry out, creating what one agricultural official calls a “real crunch.”

All these problems, brought on or aggravated by the flooding Mississippi, add up to smaller incomes for the farmer. Many small farmers who have been struggling to get by with a marginal operation may be wiped out.

Says agricultural writer Keith L. Wilkey in the Quincy (Illinois) Herald-Whig:

“Few times, if ever, in the history of U.S. agriculture have farmers gone to the field in the spring confronted by so many imponderables . . . Cataclysmic forces bear down on the farmer from all sides in the same hours that saw one of the wettest springs in history . . . There are always a lot of ‘ifs’ in farming. But few farmers can recall when there was ever as many as this year and surely none can say they recall the issues as being as momentous.”​—May 1, 1973.

And, certainly, if the farmer is affected, you the consumer will be. Shorter supply will mean even higher food prices later in the year. A shortage of grain will mean higher costs for bakery products. But it also spells higher prices for beef and other grain-fed stock. Other losses suffered by the farmer will be reflected in your food bill.

Thus the flooding Mississippi has done more than temporarily upset the lives of people in America’s richest food-producing region. It has contributed to the growing specter of food shortage and higher prices facing people world wide.

[Picture on page 15]

All along the Mississippi, volunteers filled sandbags to hold back floodwaters from homes and other important buildings