Northside Sun outdoor columnist Jeff North stopped by to see me just as I was running up against my column deadline.
After chatting for 30 minutes, I told him I really had to get to work writing, “What are you going to write about this week,” he asked. “I think I’m going to write about what you’ve just told me.”
What Jeff told me was not good news. He said that after 47 years in the business, he’s never seen Mississippi farmers in such bad shape. “It’s a bloodbath.” He predicted 20 percent of Mississippi farmers will be pushed out of business.
Jeff is an entomologist. He studies the bugs that like to eat crops and how to control them. He knows a huge number of Delta farmers. He should know what’s going on.
I’ve heard the same story from Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, who is the main political figure sounding the alarm about the impending Mississippi farm disaster.
The main problem: commodity prices have been in free fall. China is not buying American agricultural products, probably as part of the trade wars.
During covid, the farmers did great. Prices were high. Yields were high. The money was flowing. As a result, all the inputs — tractors, pickers, fertilizer, seeds, pesticides — saw huge price increases.
Then the law of supply and demand kicked in: Commodity prices plummeted while the inputs prices remained high. Profits got wiped out in the squeeze.
The farming business, like all of life, seems simple superficially but the devil is in the details. Below the surface of everything, lies infinite complexity.
To be a successful farmer today means navigating a labyrinth of complexity: weather forecasting, crop insurance, government programs, crop lending, complex expensive equipment, labor shortages, commodity price fluctuations, irrigation, genetically modified seeds and those are just the main items.
The Greenwood area has been particularly hard hit, having to recover from the Express Grain Terminal scandal, in which farmers were bilked.
Jeff acknowledged that farmer poor mouthing is legendary. “But this time it’s real.”
The irony is that crop yields have been phenomenal, creating oversupply and commodity price collapse. It just doesn’t seem right to be a victim of your own success.
I can’t help but wonder if the Trump administration’s unprecedented international trade war with its endless rejiggering of tariffs is partially causing this farming crisis. Business needs stability and predictability in which to operate.
Jeff told me he is retiring from his corporate job of selling mosquito insecticide for a big international company. He is excited about the coming fall and has already cranked out three outdoor columns. We are really blessed to have such a talented outdoor writer for the Northside Sun. His passion for the outdoors is evident and he possesses great wordsmithing skills.
We publish Jeff’s columns not only in the Sun, but throughout the state on Emmerich News, a network of 25 community websites throughout Mississippi reaching a million readers a month. If you’re not a regular reader of Jeff’s columns, you should be. You won’t regret the effort.
Violent crime has been in the news with President Trump’s deployment of the national guard in Washington D.C. This may reduce crime, but at what cost? It is ironic that Mississippi is sending its national guard troops. The Jackson crime rate is far worse than D. C.
Quick comparisons like this is an AI sweet spot. ChatGPT computes that the Jackson murder rate is 77 per 100,000 residents. Three times higher than D. C.'s 27 murders per 100,000 residents.
So in a given year, a Jackson resident, on average, has a one in 1,300 chance of getting murdered. If you live 75 years, that’s a five percent lifetime risk of getting murdered in Jackson.
In reality, these murders are overwhelmingly linked to gang drug turf wars and domestic violence. If your are relatively peacefully married and not in the drug trade, you lifetime risk of getting murdered in Jackson is probably about one in a 1,000, far less than your lifetime risk of dying from some sort of accident, which is one in 20. Meanwhile, you have a one in 93 lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
As a practical matter, you should be 10 times more scared of your car than scared of getting murdered in Jackson, as long as you stay out of the drug trade and have a relatively peaceful marriage.
In fact, violent crime in the United States has been dropping dramatically for the last 25 years, except for the weird covid blip from which we have largely recovered.
From 1960 to the early 1990s, violent crime nearly quadrupled but since then crime has declined 71 percent according to the FBI. Murder rates today are roughly equivalent with the 1950s while overall violent crime today is about two times what it was in the 1950s.
I would argue that most of the violent crime increase is related to the rise of illegal drugs today compared to the 1950s.
Jackson’s murder rate this year is tracking about half what it was last year. That’s a huge turnaround.
What’s driving this? One would presume more police with the advent of the Capitol Police force, nearly doubling the number of police in Jackson.
Another factor could be the FBI sting operation which led to the indictment of the district attorney and mayor for bribery. The FBI indictment indicated that drug dealers were bribing law enforcement to leave them alone.
People fight over what’s valuable. Without any threat of arrest, the Jackson drug trade was very lucrative — worth killing over by gangs fighting for territory. The FBI’s action could be causing a decline in drug turf war murder rates.
