Where Fields of Dreams Are Nightmares : Midwest: Floods left farmland buried in sand. Removing it is giant task.

Last summer’s epic floods may have seemed like a Midwestern replay of the tale of Noah’s Ark. But this spring, farmers along the Missouri River’s banks feel as though they’re wandering the desert.

In what was once a cornfield, then a lake, Maurice Glosemeyer now trudges, sinking with each step, across dunes piled as high as eight feet tall. His tracks fade quickly as a cold west wind scatters the sand. Grit crunches between his teeth and stings his eyes.

Ninety of the 123 acres in this field are covered with former Missouri riverbed, courtesy of the Pinckney Bottom levee break in July and a second flood in October. Both times, when the waters receded, the sand stayed behind, sealing off the fertile loam beneath.

The scene is repeated again and again throughout the Flood Belt, from Orrick, Mo., near Kansas City, to Columbia, Ill., southeast of St. Louis. “It’s another disaster, for sure,” said Steve Young, a biologist working for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service in Missouri, the most damaged state.

The river that snakes across its namesake state flowed faster and more furiously than the Mississippi during the prodigious rains; its steep bottom was more thoroughly scoured. Now 60% of its flood plain--some 373,500 acres--lies swathed in sand.

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Pockets of Illinois and Iowa also resemble the Mojave, with sycamores and cottonwoods rather than cacti dotting the distant oases. But far less territory has been destroyed there. Four Illinois counties so far have reported 12,000 sandy acres. Iowa has yet to tally its deposits, scattered mostly along the Des Moines, Skunk and Raccoon rivers.

“I don’t know what they will do in Missouri, because we’re having a devil of a time just with ours,” said Lisa Manning, a federal program specialist based in Springfield, Ill., with the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service.

Near Peers, about 60 miles west of St. Louis, Glosemeyer has spent the last two weeks trying to level out his land. He drives the bulldozer. His wife, Jayne, operates a tractor, for the first time in 24 years of marriage to a farmer, pulling an earth scoop behind. She’s gotten it stuck more than once.

They hope that eventually they can spread the sand out enough to mix it into the soil.

They aren’t sure, though, whether the field will ever come back. “I’m going to try and plant in beans here,” said Glosemeyer, a third-generation grower. “They’ll sprout. But I’m afraid that when they’re just a few inches tall, the wind’ll blow and they’ll just shear right off.”

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To the east, Merlin Kopmann waves from a tractor, where he is duplicating the Glosemeyers’ efforts on his own sandy stretch. To the west, another neighbor farms 156 acres. Every square inch of it is covered with sand.

“It’s the same all up and down the river,” Glosemeyer said. Having latched onto a part-time federal job measuring the destruction in his county, he should know. The largest dune he’s found so far rises 12 feet high.

Hauling the sand away is not an option. Even with federal soil rehabilitation subsidies, it’s less expensive to go out and buy a new farm.

Besides, “there’s no place to take it,” Manning said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used some sand for levee repair, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the supply. “Landfills don’t want it. Concrete plants can only use so much, and there’s so much wood and debris in the sand, they don’t want to pick it out.”

Time is a factor, too. Back in 1986, a flood dumped sand all over Leroy Preussner’s farm nearby, though the quantities were nothing like this year. Preussner found an asphalt company willing to haul it away, and even pay 25 cents a ton for the stuff.

Eight years later, the trucks are still coming to Preussner’s. The job is still not done.

Sand will hold neither water nor nutrients long enough to fuel crops’ growth. So even mixing it into the underlying soil could be problematic.

That tactic is expensive as well. Brent Cook, a Columbia, Mo., livestock farmer decided in the floods’ wake to start a deep-plowing business with his brother and father. He is charging his first client $150 an acre. But he expects his price to go up to $200 as he gains experience. (Farmland costs about $1,200 an acre in these parts.)

Most plowing penetrates just a few inches of dirt. Cook has been able to turn over as much as 40 inches of soil with a cylindrical 52-inch disc. “It’s a monumental task,” he said. “It’s something that you learn as you go.”

From 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., he braves the spring windstorms that send the sand swirling, biting into his skin and sometimes reducing visibility to fewer than 50 yards. Because flood moisture is still trapped under the sand, he occasionally dips into a patch of what the locals call “blue muck.” Then he has to stop to extricate his equipment.

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The sand’s abrasiveness, he estimates, will cut the life of his $30,000 disc in half. After 400 acres, he figures, he’ll have to replace it. He got a special tractor with extra-tough tires. Regular ones, he said, would just get eaten up.

Given the obstacles, federal soil scientist Kenneth Vogt said, it might be a better idea to plant cottonwood and plan to harvest pulp in a decade or so, or perhaps think about installing a constant irrigation system.

But Vogt’s No. 1 recommendation, especially if the sand is more than six inches deep: “Abandon it.”

Even the government’s program to buy out some flood plains farmers won’t accept these fields. The purchased tracts must be set aside as wetlands, and as Glosemeyer says, “Sand don’t qualify because it ain’t wet.”

Owning wasteland is not an easy notion to accept. Glosemeyer, a bearded 45-year-old with a prominent nose and two missing bottom teeth, has already built a life once.

He is proud of his progress over the years. As a newlywed, he lived in a faded green trailer near the family hog pen. A quarter of a mile down the road is his current quarters, the neat brick house he built for himself, his wife and his children, ages 8 to 21. The family’s home place, as he calls it, has grown from a 60-acre farm to a 350-acre spread, along with another 300 acres that he rents.

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“We were debt-free once, for a month, about three years ago,” he said, laughing, behind the wheel of a truck. “Then we bought more land.”

With the sandy fields likely out of production, with the new tractor, scoop and dozer leased, the whole farm operation will technically break even this year.

That means no income for the family, with two kids in college and another getting ready to start.

“I’m personally worried about making it,” said Jayne Glosemeyer quietly, huddling by the tractor. The wind whipped through her blonde-gray curls and she crossed her arms across her chest. “When you first started out, you didn’t have to worry about your children, whether you’ll leave them with debt or with something they can start out with.”

Soon after the Missouri pushed a hole through the levee about two miles away from their farm, the Glosemeyers knew they had a lot more than a flood on their hands. Surveying their property by boat, they kept dipping oars into the water only to bring up a paddle full of sand.

The autumn flood left another deposit, raising the dunes.

When the river returned to its banks, that first walk they took together over the sand was a quiet one. There was not much to say.

At one point, Jayne figured they ought to at least get some fun out of their strange land. She brought a bunch of the kids over. Her 19-year-old and a friend played around with a couple of all-terrain vehicles.

Jayne and the others had buckets and shovels and proceeded to attempt to build a castle. “We’d never been to the beach before,” she said, “so we weren’t sure what to do.”

Even now, she takes an odd sort of pleasure in the exotic landscape. Bits of glass glisten, the tops of rotted corn stalks peek out in straight lines--they would have been plowed under months ago in other circumstances. Air currents dust the surface, arranging the fine grains into long undulating ripples.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It just doesn’t belong here.”