From the top of a Mississippi River barge, Adam Thomas surveys his farmland and the 40-foot earthen levee meant to keep water off his fields. But there’s one problem: This barge is not in the river. It’s on top of his crops, about one mile inland.
Soybeans sprout from the soil around two massive steel containers, which can carry more than a thousand tons of cargo each. Since they were washed aground by a flood in 2019, the only load these barges have carried is rainwater. Thomas and his neighbor have long joked about what to do with the barges marooned on their land.
“They thought about making basketball courts at one time as big as this thing is,” said Thomas, his voice echoing off the barge’s cavernous interior. “The last thing they hauled, I think it was coal. There’s a little left in the bottom.”
Just before New Year’s Day 2016, the Mississippi River punched a hole in the Len Small levee, built in 1943 to protect farmland along an S-shaped curve in the river known as Dogtooth Bend. That hole was never repaired. When the water rose again in 2019, it washed six barges through the breach. Four were retrieved before the flood receded, but two were left to rust.
Through the almost mile-long gap in the levee, Thomas spies a boat gliding downstream. “The view is beautiful at night when one goes by,” he said. “It looks like a floating hotel.”
The view might be beautiful, but that levee breach is a reminder that Dogtooth Bend is going to flood again.
The river had breached the levee twice before — in 1993 and 2011 — but after 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it would not be worth the cost to repair. The University of Illinois also predicted the levee would continue to fail if it were fixed.
Farmers in the area could not raise the millions of dollars it would take to rebuild the levee themselves, so a chunk of this land has effectively been ceded back to the river’s floodplain.
That left many people in Dogtooth Bend with a difficult choice: Keep farming, at least until the next flood, or walk away from land that’s been in their family for generations and give it back to nature.
“It’s sad,” Thomas said. “I remember when all this was excellent farm ground, the best of the best. And to see it slowly dissipate and disappear, it’s kind of heartbreaking.”
Thomas, a third-generation farmer, is sticking it out in Dogtooth Bend. At 38 years old, he is part of a shrinking population of farmers in Illinois, where the average age of people working the land is 58 and rising. But Thomas said he is not planning on his three sons continuing that tradition.
A ‘dynamic’ river
Dogtooth Bend is in what hydrologists call an avulsion zone, where the Mississippi River might be forging a new path.
Evidence of the river’s meandering is all over this area. About a mile and a half east of the river sits Horseshoe Lake. Thousands of years ago, it was part of the river’s main branch, before a course correction cut off this body of water, which developed into a cypress swamp teeming with birds and bullfrogs.
Jonathan Remo, a professor at Southern Illinois University who studies the Mississippi, says the river was changing its course — and flooding its banks — long before Dogtooth Bend was farmland.
“This portion of the river is very dynamic. There have been about 11 or 12 different channel courses that have been identified over the last about 3,000 years,” Remo said. “It tends to move around a lot more than other places. It moves, in geologic terms, quite frequently.”
As climate change and development exacerbate the Mississippi River’s environmental problems, Remo said many communities will have to grapple with the questions facing Dogtooth Bend: how to balance the costs of maintaining America’s aging levee system against the pain of relocating communities and farmland.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be a cost-benefit calculation. We have older infrastructure here that was built 75 to 100 years ago under a different scenario for climate,” Remo said. “What else could the land be used for and still make it economically viable for the landowners? Because we can’t put all the Mississippi River floodplain back into some type of preserve or park.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is evaluating “nonstructural mitigation” measures to blunt the force of extreme floods in Dogtooth Bend, but Bradley Krischel with the Corps’ St. Louis District said it’s becoming difficult to plan for greater extremes on the river.
“We’ll have these flood years, then we’ll have drought years. It seems like that’s becoming worse,” Krischel said. “It’s really hard to design for these extreme cases.”
‘You love the river, but then sometimes you just have to get out of its way’
The Mississippi ambles for about 27 miles in a sinuous S-shape just north of its confluence with the Ohio River. Remo said when it floods Dogtooth Bend, the river “is trying to take a shortcut.”
Even a temporary shortcut can transform the landscape. The flood in 2016 dumped more than 300 million tons of sand on Dogtooth Bend, enough to fill the Superdome five times.
“Underneath here somewhere used to be farmland,” said Tharran Hobson, standing on a windswept dune that would look more at home in the desert Southwest than in southern Illinois. There’s an abandoned machine shed in the distance, but nothing else to suggest this was a productive farm just a few years ago.
“Now it’s a lot of sand,” Hobson said. “We’re standing on a 10-foot sand berm and looking out across acres and acres of sand.”
Hobson is with The Nature Conservancy, which manages some of the land that’s been smothered by river-bottom sand. Out of 15,000 acres of tillable farm ground in Dogtooth Bend, Thomas said the 2019 flood “completely destroyed” about 4,000 acres.
Beginning in 2015, the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service offered easements to some landowners, compensating people whose land had been ruined as long as they agreed not to farm it again. Those payments covered, in some cases, 80% of the land’s value. The Nature Conservancy came in later and offered to pay some landowners the remaining value for land no longer suited to growing corn and soybeans, but which might become a haven for wildlife.
Hobson dons rubber boots, grabs a net and trudges through a mucky pond in search of tadpoles. He’s looking for threatened Illinois chorus frogs, one of many species that make use of temporary wetlands near the river that Hobson calls “floodless.”
“This is an area that was part of a scour, and this part of the restoration plan, we had some heavy equipment come in here and deepen that by about a foot,” Hobson said. “We’re hoping that this ephemeral wetland will be breeding grounds for Illinois chorus frogs in the Spring, when they are looking for that type of habitat.”
Cottonwoods also thrive in the new marshes, reaching 20 feet high after just a few years of growth. The trees ring with a choir of songbirds, from indigo buntings to bright-yellow prothonotary warblers.
“Growing up on a large floodplain river, you have an affinity for it,” said Hobson, who left behind farmland elsewhere in Illinois after repeated flooding. “You love the river, but then sometimes you just have to get out of its way.”
Today, flocks of black terns dive for fish at the spot where the Len Small levee burst in 2016.
Molly Sobotka cuts the engine on her boat and drifts into the inlet that formed behind the levee breach. She’s taking water quality measurements for the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Sobotka said the river is a migratory path for fish as well as birds, and little side channels of water like this are important habitat, even though it might not look like much more than a scraggly inlet.
“Fish are coming here from thousands of miles away,” Sobotka said. “They might stay here for a couple months. They might stay here for a couple days, and then move somewhere else, but the river is the pathway between all these different habitats.”
A migratory “swimway,” she calls it, for native species like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo, and lake sturgeon — as well as invasive carp.
“Animals were responding here within a year,” she said. “How did they find it? I don’t know, but they do!”
It’s encouraging to see so much nature return so quickly, Sobotka said, but it can be more complicated for people to adapt.
‘It’s sad to pass it on’
Elaine Bonifield said she had to do some “soul searching” before accepting an offer from the USDA and The Nature Conservancy that took her family’s farmland out of production.
Bonifield is 81 years old. Her family has owned land in the area going back to the 19th century. But she said flooding made it impossible to keep farming.
“Now it’ll become government land, and I can accept that. I don’t like it. But I can’t turn back time,” Bonifield said. “Life is crazy. You may think today you know what’s best but the whole environment can change around you.”
If there’s one thing that’s constant through all that change, she said, it’s that everything depends on the river.
“We have known all of our lifetime that the planet is changing. Rivers have been changing all that time, too,” Bonifield said. “I’m sad that we had to sell the ground that was in our family’s name. It’s sad to sell it, and it’s sad to pass it on and to think about your family’s little link in this necklace of history that pertains to that particular piece of ground. But I guess before that, some Indian chief did lay claim to this part of the world. What makes you think that it isn’t gonna change and go on again?”
Despite that lingering sadness, Bonifield said she is happy her land has a new heritage — one with a little more room for nature. She likes visiting the mergansers that dive for crayfish on her former farm.
“They can raise their young, grow old, come back year after year, and it works,” she said. “It’s self-perpetuating. That’s the piece I would hate to lose.”
The ducks, at least, are adapting to the new reality of the river.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR