FTA:

"Things feel so hopeless that at a recent Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, a group representing farmers, participants floated the idea of a government program that would pay producers to destroy the harvested rice sitting in their bins. A similar program was put in place during the 1980s farm crisis, when the Agriculture Department paid farmers to idle land and reduce huge surpluses of crops.

"We are making a lot of good crops, and losing money," said Gwin Smith, the longtime owner of Rutledge Investment Company, a Mississippi agricultural land broker.

The Mississippi Delta is a 200-mile-long pocket of fertile soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. But farming costs are high. Most crops must be planted in a short window between spring rains and summer heat, and it is always a race in the fall to harvest and prepare fields before winter rains render them muddy and unworkable. This forces up labor costs during those periods.
And unlike Midwest summers, when rains provide most of the water for crops, drier Mississippi summers mean crops must be irrigated, requiring equipment and expensive fuel to power pumping.

Mississippi's biggest advantage, besides good soil, is the diversity of things that can be grown. While most of the Midwest grows only corn, soybeans and wheat, Mississippi farmers can grow those crops as well as cotton and rice. Whenever one crop is selling at a premium, farmers will shift to growing more of it."

~snip~

Between Dummkopf Trumpf's idiotic tariffs, ICE raids against migrant workers, and the inter-galactically stupid idea of dismantling USAID which could have bought these crops to feed vulnerable people in the Third World, today's American farmers may be writing their own sequel to The Grapes of Wrath.

Good job, American farmers. Betcha y'all will vote Republican again in 2026 and 2028.