In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.
Kunzig writes:
“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.”