The Time Capsule: Rain hurts crops, shrimp and oyster harvest

It would not be surprising if, in the not-too-distant future, men like Murray the Oyster Guy will take an unpaid and unwanted vacation.  The year before last, when a red tide shut down all of Matagorda Bay, hundreds in that community were out of work.  Some of them worry about what’s coming down the Mississippi, and it’s not the topsoil.         

Other years I’ve enjoyed going to marinas in the late afternoon, watching boats come in and unload shrimp or, as the weather grew colder and shrimp moved to deeper water, bag after bag of oysters. Through the fall and winter of 2011-12 the boats didn’t go out on Matagorda and several adjoining bays. Water took on a dull, reddish cast, and beaches were littered with dead fish. Sport fishermen stayed home. People who normally shucked a few clams for the chowder did without.  Commercial guys like Murray, who would sell me a 100 pound bag of oysters right off the boat, laid off his deck hands and spent the winter waiting for better water. Hillman’s Wholesale Oysters, a business that normally bought and sold by the ton and employed dozens of workers, closed their doors.      

According to people who study these things, red tides can and do occur naturally.  They happened before farm and lawn chemicals and industrial dumps. More recently though, the increased frequency and severity of algae bloom has been attributed, in part, to chemical fertilizers washed from farm fields and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.  Eating seafood taken from red tide waters can make people very sick, so authorities have no choice but to shut things down. 

You can do your own research and believe whichever scientific report suits your inclination with regard to the correlation between fertilizer runoff and algae bloom. Shrimpers and oystermen have done so and the ones I know are pointing north. 

With this in mind take a ride around the rural back roads of southwest Iowa.  You’ll see some very good practices, fields that handled day after day of rain with minimal runoff.  In sharp contrast are hillsides, without terraces, land that had been in pasture for decades, now planted to GMO corn and beans.  Waterways that once were are no longer.  As the total acres planted to corn goes up the old fencerows, trees and anything else standing in the way of an additional row of ethanol, gets bulldozed.  What we see near home is, no doubt, representative of what’s taking place elsewhere in the Corn Belt.   

In late May, came the monsoon. Eastern Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, parts of Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois and Minnesota received rain, rain and then more rain.  For a week, I emptied my gauge daily, often an inch or two at a time.  When the total passed eight inches I gave up, pulled the gauge and put it in the garage.  And then it rained some more. 

Things can change, but this may prove to be an off year for midwest crops.  It could also, because of what’s headed downriver, be bad news for shrimp and oysters and families who make their living harvesting them.  

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.