Winn County, because of our topography and geography, is a flood prone county and it affects our annual budget drastically in flood years. We have three rivers and many many more streams and springs covering our land. With changes in climate and yearly loss of our soil due to agricultural practices, we are going to continue to see more damage from flooding in the coming years unless we are proactive NOW to help mitigate it. (Iowa’s #1 export is soil!) We can look for more no-till farming practices, encourage regenerative farming, replace some ‘plant’ crops with solar fields to help with clean energy, and so much more. We can create ‘drawdown’ zones to help with flood water disbursements over larger areas to alleviate the strain on our bridges.
“Plant” large scale solar fields ($600-$1000/acre rental right now on these to landowners/farmers). These can also help mitigate flooding because the land is not being tilled up, they plant ‘perennial cover crops’ around them, it holds the soil in place.
There are 13 million acres of corn in Iowa today. What if just 40,000 acres of that could be put into clean energy solar panel fields?!
Shirley Vermace 