Delta
Transforming America’s poorest region
Essay by Robert Kunzig
Illustrations by Mike McQuade
South of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the valley of the Mississippi River fans out into a broad plain known as the Delta. The name is misleading: The region lies hundreds of miles north of the true river delta at the Gulf of Mexico. But this inland Delta was created by the Mississippi too.
For thousands of years, before levees were built to confine it, the river channel snaked wildly back and forth across the valley, at times reaching as far as Little Rock, a hundred miles west of its present course. Every part of the region was once either under the river or so close that it was regularly flooded. As a result, Delta soils are ancient river sediments, generally more than a hundred feet thick. They’re as fertile as can be.
In Egypt, along the Nile, such deposits once gave rise to a great civilization. That’s not what happened along the Mississippi. The Delta today is perhaps the poorest region in the U.S.—a flatland of small, half-abandoned towns surrounded by large, mechanized farms. The land ownership is predominantly white, the poverty disproportionately Black. The farms mostly grow commodities—soybeans, corn, cotton, and rice. Only the rice becomes food for humans. The soybeans and corn are processed into animal feed and ethanol, mostly outside the region; the cotton is exported to textile mills in Asia. Meanwhile, the Delta itself is a food desert. Grocery stores are scarce. Food insecurity is rampant.
The history of how this happened—how one of the country’s most fertile farming regions became a knot of poverty, hunger, and racial injustice—is complicated and painful. But the more urgent question is whether anything can be done to cut the knot. World Wildlife Fund, an organization with a longstanding interest in how agriculture affects the planet, is pushing one idea it thinks would benefit not just the Delta but the country as a whole: Delta farmers could start growing more food that people actually eat—“specialty crops,” such as fruits, vegetables, and other high-value foods.
“If we took 5 percent of the acres and diverted them into almost anything that wasn’t a commodity, it’s literally an additional $2.5 billion in revenue, just at the farm gate,” said Pete Nelson, president and founder of AgLaunch, a Memphis farmers’ collective and ag-tech accelerator that is partnering with WWF. Processing the crops in the Delta would funnel even more money into the regional economy.
The change would make the whole U.S. food system more resilient. Demand for fresh produce is rising rapidly. We already import around half of it, and two-thirds of the fruits and nearly half the vegetables we do grow ourselves come from one place: California. As the planet warms, that dependency is looking increasingly unsustainable. The problem is water. Farmers in California’s Central Valley have been over-pumping groundwater for decades, and climate forecasts call for longer, more severe droughts in the state, punctuated by more extreme rains. Large growers and corporate produce buyers are already looking for other sources of supply.
In WWF’s view, the Delta could be the “Next California.” Sitting in the middle of the country, the Delta has plenty of water and great logistics as well as rich soil. For years, a few people in the region have preached the gospel of specialty crops. WWF is now helping to organize such efforts. It has assembled a large and diverse council of regional actors—farmers, academics from land grant universities, NGO representatives, bankers—who are actively working to push the Delta’s agricultural economy toward something new.
The Delta wouldn’t need to abandon commodity crops, or rival California’s output of fruits and vegetables, to get a shot at redemption. For a century, it has been a place people fled, especially the Black people whose labor once helped build a cotton kingdom here. “We don’t want to just produce more artichokes or more lettuce. We also want to produce communities,” said Jason Clay, a senior vice president of WWF. “We want to have a business in those communities that attracts the kids to come back.” The best way to do that is to start rebuilding agriculture in the Delta, from the dirt up.
• • • •
In the last third of the nineteenth century, the Delta was a place people flocked to, a land of opportunity for Blacks and whites alike. Cotton farming had begun before the Civil War, using enslaved labor, but only near the riverbanks. At the end of the war, 90 percent of the Delta in Mississippi remained forested, swampy wilderness—an unclaimed frontier. Much the same was true on the Arkansas side.
A land rush ensued, and freed slaves were a big part of it. White planters needed them for the back-breaking labor of clearing forest, but now they had to offer them much more decent terms. Many Blacks were able to work their way up from renting land from whites to buying their own. By 1900, two-thirds of farm owners in the Mississippi Delta were Black, even if most of the land was still white-owned.
In the twentieth century, all that changed: Blacks in the Delta and throughout the South lost most of their land. First, Jim Crow segregation laws, violently enforced, deprived them of basic rights, making it harder to acquire or hold onto land, and ensuring that for most Blacks, the only option was to serve as cheap labor on white-owned farms. Large plantations reemerged in the Delta, worked by sharecroppers rather than slaves. After World War I, Blacks began to migrate to cities in the North, looking for more opportunity—and less lynching.
After World War II, a second factor dramatically accelerated the Great Migration. In 1944, International Harvester tested the first mechanical cotton picker on a plantation just south of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsolete—you no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains. The farms had to be large, though, to pay off the machines. Farmers needed access to ever more capital—and banks and local offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematically denied loans and other opportunities to Black farmers.
As mechanization was driving Black sharecroppers to leave the Delta, Black farmers who owned land were losing it. In 1920, Blacks owned or operated 14 percent of all farmland in the U.S.; today it is less than 2 percent. In the Delta, it is around 1 percent, and those farms cover, on average, less than 100 acres. That’s a fifth of the overall average in the Delta.
It’s no accident that blues music, the Delta’s best-known product, emerged in this region, according to historian John C. Willis. In Forgotten Time, a history of the Mississippi Delta from the Civil War to 1920, Willis describes the rise and fall of a promised land. The blues were born, he writes, not just of “anger and sadness” but of “the sense of a promise betrayed, the knowledge that a unique moment had passed and that the prospects of poor Blacks might never soar so high again.”
Today, the agricultural infrastructure of the Delta—physical, economic, and intellectual—is set up to underpin a commodity economy that intrinsically favors large farms and export markets. From the cotton gins and the grain elevators along the Mississippi to the John Deere and Case dealerships on the outskirts of the depressed towns, from the banks that provide crop loans to the USDA and university labs that research new varietals and growing strategies and the extension agents that pass such knowledge on to farmers—all are attuned to cotton, soybeans, corn, and rice. So, above all, are federal subsidies, which offer crop insurance and price supports to commodities but little to specialty crops.
That doesn’t mean all commodity farmers in the Delta are thriving. In fact, many are struggling, especially in 2024, when input costs have soared—for fuel, fertilizer, equipment, insurance—while commodity prices have plummeted due to overproduction. But the barriers to shifting to something new are high even for farmers who are eager for change. North of Clarksdale, I met Cali and Mark Noland, a young couple farming cotton on land that has been in Cali’s family for a century. In the past few years, to get a premium price for their crop and to restore the health of their soil, they’ve been shifting to “regenerative practices.” They till less, plant cover crops after harvest, and have drastically cut their use of fertilizer and insecticides.
Five or six years ago, Mark said, they seriously considered growing vegetables. They concluded it would take too much investment in refrigerated transport and storage, processing plants, and above all labor—all of which California has but the Delta lacks. Growing fruits and vegetables requires a lot more manual labor than growing cotton or corn. The Delta, I heard again and again, no longer has enough people willing to do those exhausting jobs in the Delta heat. Only migrants will do it, and arranging for that is cumbersome.
Mark took me to the front window to point out the nearby levee, the only rise in the table-flat landscape. The Mississippi is constantly recharging the aquifer that Delta farmers rely on, he said, “so water is not a problem.” Then he and Cali took me out back to sink a shovel into the nearest field and show me the richness of the dark soil—deposited in the millennia before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the levees, when the river still frequently jumped its banks.
The premise of the Next California project is that the Delta’s great natural resources, which made the cotton kingdom possible, are “totally underutilized,” Pete Nelson at AgLaunch told me. “We could build it better and build it differently.” Traveling through the Delta, I sometimes found it hard to envision how a whole new specialty-crop economy could grow through the cracks of a landscape paved with commodity crops. Think of a kaleidoscope, Jason Clay at WWF said: “If you just turn the notch one time, you can see a whole different configuration.”
Now, the two organizations are trying to help the Delta make that turn.
• • • •
Clay, who heads the Markets Institute at WWF, grew up in the 1950s and ’60s on a 156-acre farm in northwestern Missouri, the eldest boy of seven children in a four-room house without indoor plumbing. When he was fifteen, a tractor flipped over on his father and killed him. That put Clay and his mother in charge until he went to Harvard. All his siblings left, too. “Everybody left because there was no way to make a living,” he said; the farm was too small. Clay didn’t escape his roots though. He’s a big reason why WWF has focused so heavily on the need to “rethink food”—the title of his weekly newsletter—for the benefit of all, including small farmers.
That might seem an unlikely focus for an organization whose emblem is a panda. But globally, agriculture is a major threat to wildlife, as well as a major contributor to climate change. In both cases, it’s the initial conversion of undisturbed land to farmland that has the biggest impact. Climate change itself increases the risk of land conversion by altering growing conditions and displacing crops. More than a decade ago, Clay started thinking about how climate change would affect fruit and vegetable growing in California—and about whether, by “looking sideways” at the shift, it might be steered in a positive direction.
“The driving environmental goal is to avoid land conversion,” said Julia Kurnik, whom Clay hired in 2018 and who manages the Next California project. “If it’s coming to the Delta, it’s going to be existing farmland switching from one crop to another, not new land being converted. That would be a massive environmental win” for the planet.
Kurnik, who lives outside Philadelphia, didn’t know the Delta before. It’s a strangely affecting place. The vast flat fields interrupted at intervals by bands of primeval woods; the graceful old pecan trees rising from a sea of lush grass; even the ruined buildings and the people who are fighting history—it all grows on you. As Kurnik began to travel there and listen to farmers and assemble an advisory council, her conception of the Next California and its goals broadened. It became as much about improving life and social equity in the Delta as about sparing the climate and the planet.
It also became clear that the name of the project lends itself to misinterpretation: Most of California’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables are unlikely to be transplanted to the Delta. It’s no accident that California became America’s garden. Its climate allows growers to harvest two crops a year, and its sandy, well-drained soils are less conducive to pests and disease. Even its dryness has an upside: Farmers can determine exactly when and how much water they deliver to crops—as long as irrigation water is available.
The Delta has the great advantage of plentiful water. But the rains often come at the wrong time, and because the land is flat and the soil is clayey in a lot of places, it has a tendency to get waterlogged. Along with the high heat and humidity, that promotes plant diseases and leads to extreme pressure from insect pests.
WWF asked Trey Malone, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas, to study which specialty crops would be most likely to succeed. Malone ended up skeptical that much of California’s production of 230-odd crops would grow well in the Delta—but bullish on the idea that the Delta could grow a lot more specialty crops. It should focus first, he said, on crops it has a history with. That would include sweet potatoes, field peas (such as the black-eyed kind), peanuts, okra, and tomatoes; and fruits such as watermelon, blackberries, blueberries, and peaches. “The Delta should be doing what the Delta does best,” Malone told me.
Perhaps the most immediate economic opportunity, he said, would be for the Delta to lean into specialty versions of the commodities it’s known for: growing edamame for human consumption instead of soybeans for livestock, or jasmine or basmati rice instead of long-grain. Though Arkansas grows more rice than any other state, it’s California that leads in those high-priced specialty varieties.
Malone and others working with WWF don’t assume that many large commodity farmers will switch to vegetables. They’re targeting smaller farmers, especially Black ones, who have less to lose and more to gain. When Kurnik first started talking with farmers in the Delta, she said, “my expectation was that it would be a hard sell to suddenly switch crops. And that actually has not been the case.” It turned out there were already people in the Delta thinking along the same lines.
• • • •
Harvey Williams first heard about the Next California project when he met Nelson at a dinner in 2021. Williams had recently opened a distillery in downtown Helena, Arkansas, a block west of the levee. The tasting room is an elegant space on a desolate street, and as you nurse your drink at the U-shaped bar you can look through a large window at the tall distilling columns that rise like giant copper clarinets from a mass of gleaming stainless steel. On a wall near the bar there’s a large framed print of a gorgeous old Corps of Engineers map, which shows the Mississippi’s past penchant for wandering and flooding the land. The distillery is called Delta Dirt.
As he talked to Nelson, Williams liked the sound of the WWF project. “But my mind almost immediately went to, wow, you have a bigger task in front of you than you might realize,” he recalled. “Because it will be a challenge to change generational mindsets about what’s grown here in the Delta. It will take some changes of hearts and minds before you actually change the fields.” In Williams’ own case, though, the change had long since happened. On the land he grew up on, land his family had worked since the nineteenth century, his father and brother had been growing sweet potatoes and other vegetables for decades.
In Arkansas, 90 percent of the sweet potato crop is grown from shoots produced at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a historically Black land grant university whose mission is to help Black farmers, like the Williams family, in the Delta. The shoots come from plant scientist Sathish Ponniah’s lab, which certifies them to be free of yield-depressing viruses. Since he arrived here in 2011, Ponniah told me, the state’s sweet potato acreage has expanded from 3,000 to 6,370. That’s significant growth, but there’s room for a lot more—especially if the tubers can be converted into higher-value products.
That’s what Williams and his family do at Delta Dirt: They make sweet potato booze. Since 2021, their vodka has won top honors in every trade competition they’ve entered. This past April, Delta Dirt introduced its version of bourbon. It goes for $80 a bottle, which allows for a higher profit margin than sweet potatoes. The first distilling run sold out on the first day.
Across the river in Mississippi, Alcorn State University, another historically Black institution, operates an Extension Program for farmers. The program includes a research farm in Mound Bayou, an historic little town that epitomizes the scale of what has been lost—and could be recaptured—in the Delta. Founded in 1887 by Isaiah Montgomery and other formerly enslaved people, Mound Bayou was envisioned as a Black utopia. And for decades, that’s what it was: a thriving town with 13 stores, three cotton gins, a bank, and a newspaper. A refuge from Jim Crow and a cradle of the civil rights movement, Mound Bayou remains an all-Black town today—but a hollowed out one. There are two convenience stores and a food pantry but no grocery. The high school closed in 2018. In one of its buildings, residents have since opened a museum showcasing the town’s historic importance.
John Coleman graduated from Alcorn State and now runs the research farm for the Extension Program. His own family arrived in Mound Bayou in 1906. According to the story they’ve handed down, it was after one cruelty too many from a plantation owner in Panther Burn, Mississippi, that Coleman’s great-grandfather gathered his wife and five sons and hopped the train 60 miles north, where he’d heard there was a place for Black folks. In Mound Bayou, Montgomery greeted them at the station.
“He said, ‘Go three and a half miles west. There is some land that needs to be cleared off, and that land could be yours,’” Coleman said. “And I own that land today.”
Coleman grows soybeans on those 40 acres, which he can handle in his spare time without extra labor. But on the 45-acre research farm, he mostly grows what his dad used to grow on a little vegetable patch, back when everyone gardened and shared with their neighbors: purple hull peas and “good old turnip, mustard, and collard greens.” People come to pick their own greens, paying $7 to fill a 13-gallon trash bag.
For the peas, which are like black-eyed peas but with purple pods and eyes, Coleman and his colleague Percy Baldwin have found a different market. With the help of the Mississippi Delta Council for Farm Worker Opportunities, a nonprofit, they’ve enlisted a few dozen farmers to grow a total of about 200 acres worth of peas. The Alcorn State Extension Program operates a small processing plant in Marks where machines shell the peas, and workers wash and pack them in one-pound plastic bags. From July to September, the plant delivers about 2,000 bags a week, labeled “Locally Grown in Mississippi,” to Kroger supermarkets.
For now, it’s just a sideline for the farmers: Each of them grows at most a few acres of peas—as much as they can get harvested by hand, in a place where few people want that work. But Coleman thinks the potential market is much larger. “I could sell peas all day,” he said. Walmart was interested, but its minimum order tends to be enough to stock one of its distribution centers—each of which serves around 100 stores. Coleman is caught in a bind: He needs to ramp up production in order to expand, but the farmers can’t plant more purple hull peas, he said, because neither they nor the Extension Program can afford the machines to harvest them.
“If we don’t get the equipment,” Coleman said, “this idea will die.”
One of the farmers growing peas is Robbie Pollard. He grew up poor with a single mom in Batesville, and came to farming both early—riding around with his grandfather on his tractor—and late, after knocking around other jobs. That prompted, he said, a period of “just praying and asking God to show me the way. And this is where it led me: to growing food.”
“Women and minority farmers who live on the margins of the industry at large are deserving of a first shot at the specialty rice industry.”
