About 30 landowners from the Prairie Creek watershed met with the NRD's Eastern Projects Committee on Thursday to discuss the problems and possible solutions so farmers can plant crops with some assurance that floodwaters won't wipe them out.
Prairie Creek originates in eastern Buffalo County and runs northeast until draining into the Platte River near Duncan in Platte County. Prairie Creek flows through Buffalo, Hall, Merrick, Nance and Platte counties.
Milt Moravek, Central Platte NRD assistant manager, said more than 400,000 acres of drainage goes into Prairie Creek.
Speaking at the meeting were Bob and Mona Dubas, who have farmland in Hall County near the Merrick County line, where Moores Creek drains into Prairie Creek.
The Dubases have been farming the land since the early 1980s. Mona Dubas said they have had flooding about every five years. This year was by far the worst as they were not able to harvest a crop on more than 100 acres.
They were unable to plant soybeans but were able to plant sorghum by late June, though it did not yield well. Floodwaters 5 feet deep inundated parts of their farmland.
"It was a mess," Dubas said
The hard part, she said, was the higher price of corn and soybeans this year.
"This was our year to catch up, and now we can't," she said.
Dubas said it also hurts the productivity of the land when it's constantly waterlogged. There's also the extra cost of treating the land to manage the weeds caused by flooding.
"The crops that do survive are not the same," she said. "And we had trouble harvesting because it is so wet. It takes our profit away."
Another farmer, Ken Torczon of Duncan, farms land where Prairie Creek drains into the Platte River in Platte County.
Torczon said the flooding prevented him from having a crop at all this year.
"It's getting worse," he said. "It's washing my farm away."
Moravek said the NRD commissioned a study of Prairie Creek in the mid-1980s.
He said the NRD did a number of snagging and clearing projects on Prairie Creek, beginning in the 1970s, to clear the creek channel of debris, such as dead trees and shrubs, and allow better water flow.
Obstructions in the channel, especially during times of heavy flow, can cause flooding throughout the watershed. Moravek said clearing the channel of natural obstructions can double the amount of water going through the channel during high flow. The NRD also cleared about a 25- to 30-foot area on either side of the channel to allow for better flow during flooding.
Moravek said the NRD has also done a lot of maintenance over the years throughout the entire Prairie Creek watershed whenever a landowner had a concern. It has also eliminated some of the bottlenecks along Prairie Creek to make the width of the channel more uniform, especially in Merrick County.
Moravek told people attending the meeting that more snagging and clearing needs to be done along Prairie Creek. He said the NRD has allotted more than $100,000 in its budget this year to address the problem.
Currently, the NRD is working on the Prairie/Silver/Moores flood control project northwest of Grand Island. Two of the project's five flood control cells have been completed, and Moravek said flood gates will be added next year to control the amount of water flowing in the creek during times of high water.
But for the more than 60 miles of Prairie Creek flowing northeast from Grand Island, Moravek said, there's still 375,000 acres of land draining into the creek.
He said there will be benefits for Grand Island from the Prairie/Silver/Moores flood control project, "but we are not seeing much benefit from Grand Island on east."
Moravek estimated about a 5-percent improvement in reduced flow during a flood as a result of the project. But completion is in doubt as state funding has slowed.
Moravek said the board will discuss at its December meeting the possibility of conducting another study of the Prairie Creek watershed to see if there are other means to address the flooding problems for landowners.
