By Strange Sounds -Jul 30, 2020
A second year of flooding is threatening to ruin another year of crop harvests for farmers in the Mississippi River Delta, one of the poorest regions in the US.
With the coronavirus already ravaging the region, farmers are now facing a second year without profits.
The southern Mississippi Delta is home to some of the most fertile farmland in the United States.
But not a single crop of soybeans, cotton, corn, or rice has been planted at many farms in the region — one of the poorest in the country.
For the second year in a row, widespread flooding has left hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland underwater, ruining entire harvests. And now, with their fields submerged, farmers are bracing for another year of no income.
For farmers in the Delta, it’s a worst-case scenario playing out in real time.
“We had hopes that this year we would be able to get back to normal. Mother Nature had other plans,†Victoria Darden, a farmer in Onward, Mississippi, said.
Submerged farmlands
The sight of submerged farmland has become depressingly routine since February of 2019, when heavy rains began swelling in the Mississippi River. The south Delta was hit especially hard — by May of that year, 548,000 acres were underwater, an area almost three times the size of New York City. The flooding caused 12 deaths and an estimated $20 billion in damages.
More:
https://strangesounds.org/2020/07/flooding-mississippi-river-delta-crop-harvest.html
