The Long View

For more than a century, the Mississippi Delta’s farming landscape has undergone constant change.

- Boyce Upholt

To the east of the highway, or maybe to the southeast—I was a little turned around—the horizon looked slightly grey.

“That must be rain over Shelby,” Richard Noe says. He’d gotten a call a few minutes earlier about a downpour crossing the Delta, which he hoped was coming his way. Some of his fields had been drenched by thunderstorms the night before, but they had skirted one outlying patch of land.

To me, though, it just looked like grey. I had driven through Shelby on the way to Noe’s farm, but, turned around by our looping route over the farm roads, now I couldn’t point my way home.

I consider myself knowledgeable about the Delta and its landscape, but Noe, clearly, is on another level.

There is one thing I’m clear on: the Mississippi Delta is a land of farms. Despite its small size (it constitutes one seventh of Mississippi’s land), over three quarters of Mississippi’s row crops are grown here. To some of us—like me—those crops become, at times, just scenery zipping past. For Noe, though, and for the many farmers of the Delta, they are a make-or-break investment.

“If you have a bad crop year now,” he says, “Everything is so expensive. It’s hard to come out of it. It could take five or six years.”

The Delta in its modern form began in the early 19th century, when pioneer farmers, making wild bets of their own, first carved plantations from the swampy woods. Development slowly filled inwards from the riverbanks, as the hardwood forests were cleared away. By 1930, after a century of development, the Delta and its famous soil had become an epicenter of the Southern cotton kingdom.

Nearly a hundred years more have brought changes. Drive the Delta’s highways in late fall, for example, and there is no familiar flash of cotton white.