jillb@standard-democrat.com
WYATT - It is an area of marked contrast.
A farmer's tractor moves along a roadway to a field where planting will soon begin. Just across the road is a field with a scoured ditch and pocked with sediment from the floodwaters which inundated the 130,000 acres of the floodway after the Birds Point-New Madrid levee was breached by the Corps of Engineers.
Further down the road on the banks of a ditch winding through Consolidated Drainage District 1 of Mississippi County, excavators reach into the brown water, scoop out silt and load it onto trucks. The trucks traveled yards up the ditch where it is used to recreate the ditch's banks.
This work took on a heightened pace Wednesday as NRCS State Conservationist J.R. Flores and John Story, president of Consolidated Drainage District No. 1, signed an amendment to a cooperative agreement for flood-recovery work in the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway utilizing Natural Resources Conservation Service' Emergency Watershed Protection program.
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