URBANA, Ill. — A University of Illinois researcher who has studied the 2011 flooding of the Mississippi River valley concluded the intentional flooding of prime farmland in Missouri may have caused permanent damage.

Researcher Kenneth Olson and co-author Lois Wright Morton, in a report published in the Jan.-Feb. 2012 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, suggest some of the floodway farmland be set aside for conservation use and that levees be constructed further from the river to minimize damage to structures and land.

The deliberate flooding of the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, Olson states, will create long-lasting, if not permanent, agricultural damage to hundreds of acres.  Rushing water gouged large deep gullies, some more than 10 feet deep, on the flatland. Thick sand deposits also were left behind.

“The initial additional force and depth of floodwater caused more damage to buildings and more deep land scouring than was predicted,” Olson said. “The strong current and sweep of water … created deep gullies in 133,000 acres of Missouri farmland, displaced tons of soil and damaged irrigation equipment, farms and homes.”

Some of the floodway land could be set aside as wetlands, freeing up more space for future flood control, he wrote.

“The resulting land surface will have less soil aggregation, less organic carbon and be more sloping, making it difficult to farm the land,” Olson said. “Some of this lost cropland could be restored as wetlands and wildlife habitat adjacent to the patched levees.”

The researcher’s recommendation for better flood control? More temporary water storage areas could be created, crops could be rotated more often to include more forages rather than row crops and more of the land could be converted to grassland or timberland. He also said higher and stronger levees could be constructed further from the river to widen the river channel.

“It would also be logical to accept periodic levee breaks or stop using the floodplain soil for agricultural crop production,” Olson said. “Instead, the land could be converted to conservation use and restore the periodic water storage function to the natural floodplain.”

Such suggestions don’t sit well with farmers who have lived on the land for decades. And despite the flooding of crops and damage to the land, growers were able to plant soybeans on about 90 percent of the floodway land once water receded mid-summer.

Army Corps officials have already spent about $25 million, and expect to spend at least $20 million more, to repair the Birds Point levee, something farmers pushed hard to get done before this spring. To take prime acreage out of production would be to take farmers’ livelihoods away, said farmer John Story, who tends to about 2,000 acres in the floodway. “What they did was wrong in the first place. Fixing the levee is the only answer,” he said.