Page 14 October 27, 2015
2015 Logan County Farm Outlook Magazine
LINCOLN DAILY NEWS.COM
So, if tiling doesn’t work and the producer
can’t build a levy, what other options are there.
Dickerson said, first of all, the farmers who have
owned and farmed this land for a generation or
more, know the land is prone to flooding, and
they are used to that. For them, it is one of the
consequences of having low lying land. The
question for the producer then becomes, how
many bad years can we tolerate?
Dickerson said each producer is going to have to
determine that threshold for him/herself. Maybe
it is going to be that one lost crop for every three
or four good crops is worth continuing to farm the
land. Or maybe four or five lost years out of ten
is going to make the field a lost cause. Only the
producer can decide when enough is enough.
But when he or she does decide to stop farming
the land, there are still options for making money
from the acreage. Dickerson said in the photo, the
first thought is that the ground could become part
of the Farm Service Agency Conservation Reserve
Program (CRP).
Dickerson said that the enrollment in CRP goes
through the FSA office, and then is passed on
to his office. Soil and Water Conservation then
works to determine what type of conservation
should go into the land. At first glance, he said
the goal would be to return the land to its “pre-
settlement” condition, which, in this case, could
mean returning it to woodland.
So when is tiling profitable? Dickerson said
there are many, many acres in Logan County that
would benefit from tiling. He said it is important
to remember that in pre-settlement days, a
vast majority of the land in Logan County was
swampy. While the ingenuity of William Scully
in claiming farm ground from swamps in upper
Logan County is a vital part of the Logan County
history, Dickerson said there were plenty of other
places in Logan County that were also swampy in
the beginning. He said many of those soils, even
at higher elevations are still wet due to the nature
of their soil composition. Because of this, when
rains do occur, the soils become saturated faster
than naturally dry soils.
The issue with saturated soils is two-fold. Too
much water promotes shallow root growth that
affects stand-ability in corn and can cause new
issues during harvest time, even if the crop is
Continued
