EAST PRAIRIE, Mo. — A little more than six months ago, farmers within the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway watched as flood waters finally started to recede. And what some of them saw broke their hearts.

Some of the Midwest’s most fertile land had its top scoured, and gorges with depths of more than 10 feet were cut across the flatland in some spots. But, heading into this month, thanks to perseverance and better weather conditions since late May, farmers in the 130,000-acre floodway had produced what some are calling a pretty decent crop of soybeans.

“The land itself came out better than we thought,” said Sam Atwell, an agronomist with the University of Missouri extension. “You can’t imagine really swift water 30 feet deep going miles across fields and not hurting the land more than it did.”

But after waters receded, farmers went to work. By the end of July, about 90 percent of the land had been replanted with beans, Atwell said. Shortly before the Birds Point levee was blown up in early May to ease flooding upstream on the city of Cairo, Ill., about 20,000 acres of mature winter wheat ready to harvest was underwater.

Once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blew the levy – a controversial move that Missouri took all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to prevent it – it essentially unleashed the force of the swollen Mississippi River onto the prime farmland.

Many farmers remain angry. “It’s just a calamity, really,” said John Story, who farms about 2,000 acres. “There was just no sense in what they did.”

Initial estimates of crop losses placed the flooding damages at about $65 million, not including millions more in damages to some 100 homes and farm buildings, equipment and other items.

But with a bean crop salvaged, and with most farmers expecting to put in a corn crop next season, the outlook isn’t quite as bleak as it appeared months ago, Atwell said. East Prairie Mayor Kevin Mainord, critical of the Corps’ decision to blow the levee, was able to get a crop in on 2,700 acres of the 2,800 he farms in the floodway.

“We didn’t want our grounds, want our livelihood, want our houses, want our residences destroyed by the onslaught of water that came through the floodway,” he said earlier this summer. “We feel like we were sacrificed.”

Earlier this month, as Mainord began prepping to harvest his beans, he was thankful for the crop. “I think a lot of farmers feel blessed to have a crop this year,” he said.

More than 100 of the farmers in the floodway remain party to a class-action lawsuit against the Corps for blowing the levee; that case is pending.