"The worst part of it was getting back and seeing the devastation and dealing with the devastation, cleaning up the houses, cleaning up the buildings, dealing with the debris in the fields and removing the sand," said Leo Ettleman, 57, of Percival, Iowa, who saw about 1,700 of the 2,500 acres he farms flooded last year when a federal levee broke.

So much sand was left behind that some farmland resembles a desert, complete with sand storms that have been filling in drainage ditches and leaving irrigation systems partially buried. Once plants sprout, there is a risk of blowing sand battering the seedlings or covering them up entirely.

-- Reported by the Associated Press

Forunately, the Missouri River bottom land represents a tiny portion of farmland in Iowa and Nebraska.

The Omaha World-Herald reports:

The once-raging Missouri River has calmed, but the flood fight continues for Nebraska and Iowa farmers who work the rich bottom ground along its banks.

In many places, the churning water left behind ravines, gullies and drifts of sand several feet deep.

Many affected farmers quickly finished their scanty harvests and turned their attention to mending their scarred land.

Reuters reported today that flooded cities along the Missouri River look to dry skies for relief.

Forecasts are favorable over the next several days in the northern Missouri River basin and the Souris River Basin, where Minot, N.D. residents battled flooding that forced evacuation of a quarter of the city.

It may take two or three weeks before the Souris River is back in its original channel. That outlook is based on "a perfect world with no rain," said U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Lieutenant Col. Kendall Bergmann.

See continuing coverage of the flooding in our slideshow.

Amid the recent flooding in midwestern states, it looks like Everett Rhodes has found an alternative way to navigate through the high waters.

As a monument to the workers who built the town of Omaha, Nebraska was submerged by floodwaters on Wednesday, engineers were toiling sixty miles downstream to build a temporary floodwall around the town of Hamburg, Iowa.

Read our latest story on the Missouri River flooding and a report on "the unprecedented onslaught of extreme tornadoes, flooding, drought and wildfire" that hit the country in April.