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Farmer questions Corps buy-out offers
A northwest Missouri farmer who is moving to higher ground, again, questions the motives of the Corps of Engineers. On the recommendation of the Army Corps of Engineers about impending flooding, Richard Oswald is moving his grain, contents of his home, and farm machinery out of his Missouri River bottom land in Atchison County and he says some of his neighbors are getting buy-out offers from the Corps.
Oswald tells Brownfield, “I’m not sure what to make of it. I mean, we don’t have enough money to keep the river system up, the levee system up? We’re stressed for cash to do the things that ought to be done on these levees and yet we’ve got money to buy flooded farmers out.”
Oswald, who is president of the Missouri Farmers Union, has been through this kind of flooding preparation before and he’s been through some floods. In the last several years he says they’ve had some close calls. And he’s frustrated with the Corps’ decisions on upstream river management.
“To a great extent, this excess water that we’re dealing with is water that they haven’t dealt with in those dams that they should have been sending down and making more room. And they just don’t make enough room in the lakes anymore.”
Oswald says they could be living elsewhere for two months and may be forced to stay away from the place he was born and raised in and has farmed for several decades.
“We expect to lose, if these predictions are true, we expect to lose about 80% of our crop because 80% of what we farm is here on the Missouri River bottom.” Oswald says he expects ag disaster aid to be far less than after the big flood of 1993, given the current federal budget deficit, and what he says is the declining power of the rural voter and the inflexibility of Congress.
“And I’m worried that those of us out here in the country, in these flooded areas, are gonna be forgotten,” says Oswald.
AUDIO: Richard Oswald (13:00 mp3)
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