When the Army Corps of Engineers blew up the Birds Point levee in southeast Missouri late Monday, water gushed onto 130,000 acres of farmland, drowning crops — and hopes for a good farming season.

"I've got 8,000 acres underwater. I've got a winter wheat crop underwater. I've got corn that's 4 inches high underwater," said Ed C. Marshall, who farms wheat, corn, soybeans and grain sorghum in the area. "I was six weeks away from harvesting that wheat."

The corps-engineered deluge also swamped millions of dollars in farm infrastructure, from culverts to irrigation pivots. Tens of thousands of gallons of diesel and liquid fertilizer sit in flooded tanks.

"In that spillway, all the structures are going to be gone," said Blake Hurst, head of the Missouri Farm Bureau. "Roads, bridges, center point irrigation pivots are all going down the river."

The corps dynamited the levee to relieve mounting pressure on the flood control systems guarding more populated areas upriver, particularly Cairo, Ill. But the decision exacted a heavy price: Some early estimates put the damage at $300 million. Hurst says he believes that's low, predicting the crop damage alone to be around the $100 million mark.

Hurst and others stress that, while the explosion flooded 130,000 acres in the spillway near the levee, an additional 100,000 in the area are underwater from the 20 inches of rain that have fallen in the past two weeks.

"This is going to make a tremendous difference to our production," Hurst said. "It's a big enough event to drive up crop prices."

For farmers hoping to capture income from near-record crop prices, the flooding comes at a particularly bad time.

"With prices where they are now, we were looking at some real good years," Marshall said. "We're talking about $6 corn, $7 wheat, $12 soybeans. We could be buying equipment, putting up pivots. It's going to have a huge impact on our incomes."

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Tuesday that crop insurance will cover the farmers, despite the fact that the flooding was, in effect, "man-made." (Crop insurance policies only reimburse policyholders for acts of nature.) But farmers say they usually don't have policies that cover them for potential profits, only for the loss of input costs.

Farmers have also sold some of their crops on the futures market, and some worry that they won't be able to deliver.

"I don't have crops to take to the elevator because the corps decided to blow my levee," Marshall said.

Farmers also worry that some areas may be so damaged they can't be farmed for years. The Great Flood of 1993 left so much sand and silt that some farmland is still out of commission.

"We don't know what the outcome's going to be when the water recedes," said Steve Jones, a farmer and Mississippi County commissioner.