This past week was a difficult one on many fronts and the most difficult one for the farm was the coming of Gustav to Arkansas. The first part of the week was rain, lots of rain, non-stop. And after having had several dry weeks the rain led to flooding. My farm has a small river that runs through it and though the river didn't have a big rise the after the first two days of rain, the second morning greeted us with a flood like I've never seen before.  I got a message from the neighbors that the river was rising fast and I rushed to the farm.  By the time I arrived, the high ground already had water up to my knees. 

The back pasture was a lake with at least four feet of water covering it in a fast flowing river. I could see my chickens soaking wet and perched on top of their shelter pens. My automatic poultry waterers were floating down the river, trees were bowed over in the current, and little rafts of fire ants, piled on top of one another, were clinging to whatever they could. This was a flood, unpredictable and devastating, and I was powerless. I waded back to my car and drove home to work out a plan. I made some calls looking for someone with a canoe. I found one fairly quickly, but after some discussion we decided the water was moving too quickly. Besides, we weren't sure where we could move the chickens since the entire farm was flooded. We'd have to make an attempt the next day after the water was down.

The next day I got a few friends to come help me with the clean up and we headed to the farm to assess the damage. The pasture was still soggy, and we could easily see the path of the river through the trees and grasses. A few small fish lay dead in the middle of the field along with a field rat. When we got to the chickens, several of them stood around, excited to see us. We gathered the living in some temporary fencing and fed them.   

Then it was time to collect the several dead chickens strewn around the pasture—a sight I will never forget and hope never to see again. We collected those we could find, piled them with some brush, and proceeded to cremate the remains. 

I have never had a loss on my farm of this scale. I’ve had losses though, and they always cause me to reexamine myself and my management. Should I keep doing this? Was there something I could have done? Should I have foreseen the flood and moved the chickens to higher ground? These are questions that still play in my mind. On the one hand, this was a historic flood, larger than those who lived nearby had ever seen. On the other hand, I should have thought about the possibility of flood with the amount of debris that had gathered in the river during the dry season. 

Farmers are always at the mercy of nature—we can only react and try to learn from our mistakes. This has been a year of disasters for farmers. In Iowa earlier this year farmers lost crops, valuable top soil, and whole herds of cattle to flooding. Similar scenarios in which the uncontrollable forces of nature destroyed farms have played out across the country and the world. With the effects of global warming predicted to accentuate these problems over the coming years we must prepare for more floods, more disasters, more disruptions to our food system. And we must change the way we live and farm to keep the effects of global warming from growing any worse.

Posted by Ragan Sutterfield on Sep 9, 2008 at 2:07 PM
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