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Delta Flooding Keith Perkins - Lonoke County
We're in Lonoke County. Right now the water is still rising. We've had a lot of fields
that are under water. At this point and time, it hasn't started to go down yet. The water's
come up out of our bayous and our ditches and that kind of thing and a lot of places
you can't even get to the fields without a boat or extremely tall vehicles.
Each field is going to be different, if we look at this water here, this water is kind
of still and it come up slow and it'll go down slow. You won't expect much erosion from
that. But other fields, there's a large amount of water flowing in and flowing out, so you'll
wind up having erosion from those fields and depending on where you are, you may actually
have a lot of debris washed into your field.
One thing it's doing for us is making a later planting season for our rice crop. On our
corn crop, a lot of it was already planted prior to all the floods that came in. And
some of that will have to be replanted. But the rice crop, we were only about 40% planted
in the county before the rain and the floods hit. By pushing it later, you can expect reduced
yields from that.
Rice for example, can be underwater, it's an aquatic planting, it can be underwater
for several days, but you may have to replant some acres of that. If we move to another
crop like corn, about 4 days is all it can stand water. A lot of the acres that have
water standing on it will have to be replanted of the corn.
There's a lot of equipment that's around that will be, once the water goes down, if the
equipment was flooded, especially engines and that kind of thing, the fluids will need
to be drained and they will need to make sure the upkeep of their equipment is good prior
to trying to start it. Just kind of a maintenance type of issues on that.
T o learn more about this and other topics, contact you county extension agent and visit
uaex.edu