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Sandbagging to protect crops in north MO

There’s a threat of more flooding in north Missouri while the expectation for already dry southern Missouri is very little rain. Pat Guinan, with University of Missouri Extension Commercial Ag, says an unstable weather system is locked in over the upper Midwest for the coming week. Heavy rains in the first half of June flooded bottomland crops in large sections of north Missouri. Most northern counties have stopped field work. Some soybean fields have yet to be planted while others will need to be replanted. River bottom corn fields are at risk of being flooded again.

Mercer County, on the Iowa line, has had nearly 13 inches of rain since the first of June while Bloomfield, in southeast Missouri, has had no measurable rain this month.

Chariton County’s MU agronomist Wayne Crook – in north Central Missouri – says farmers are starting to sandbag lower levees on the Grand River with others moving their machinery to higher ground, concerned that the levees won’t hold. He says early corn crops in the area look good but range from four inches tall to as much as head-high.

In east-central Missouri – St. Charles County agronomist Scott Killpack says fields “outside the levees are underwater and fields inside the levees are beginning to gain seep water.”

Guinan says the heaviest rains, two to four inches, are forecast for most of Iowa in the coming week – and whatever falls in the southern third of Iowa flows into Missouri.