Environmental Impacts on Mississippi Agriculture

Once vibrantly colored green, Mississippi’s fields have become flooded and weak. Extreme weather conditions, climate change, flooding, and droughts have become more severe in the communities in Mississippi. Climate changes are more likely to increase the severity of damages from tropical storms, harm livestock, reduce crops, and cause extremely hot temperatures. This extreme heat could potentially lead to medical-related problems and issues and even could cause death. 

Sea levels are rising more rapidly in Mississippi coastal areas compared to most other coastal areas of the Gulf. This leads to more frequent hurricanes and flooding—damaging homes, farms, and infrastructures. Dead zones occur when ocean water becomes packed full of nutrients from agricultural runoff and other impactful issues. This could lead to an overgrowth of algae that uses all the oxygen in the water, killing fish, and animals; and classifying some drinking water as harmful and unsafe to the public. 

Mississippi primarily has issues with global warming. It postpones crop production in some areas and impacts livestock feed along with water stress from potential droughts, causing further postpones in livestock productivity. Mississippi relies more on the production of summer crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton. In the winter, more crops are produced, such as lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, English peas, carrots, kale, and collards.

Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation President Mike McCormick said, “We are seeing a crisis in farm country for farmers of our major crops. Producers face this perfect storm of record-level production costs, low commodity markets, and an outdated farm safety net. The funding in this bill could mean the difference between planting a crop next year and giving up many farms in the state.” Due to this fact, Mississippi is less likely to have more successful agricultural productivity, which is only because productivity rates are dropping and the heat is extravagantly increasing. 

The USDA offers a variety of programs that provide coverage to help producers manage risk and protect their operations and crops. The impact of natural disasters offers support prices for drops in prices or revenues. This could pay up to $2.14 billion in payment to eligible landowners and agricultural producers to provide support. This will help the local Mississippians who farm, hunt, and fish, as well as agricultural producers and the locals who own their land. 

The article “Climate Impacts on Agriculture and Food Supply” states, “Higher CO2 levels can affect crop yields. Some laboratory experiments suggest that elevated CO2 levels can increase plant growth.  However, other factors, such as changing temperatures, ozone, and water and nutrient constraints, may counteract these potential increases in yield…Heat waves, which are projected to increase under climate change, could directly threaten livestock. In 2011, exposure to high-temperature events caused over $1 billion in heat-related losses to agricultural producers.” This phenomenon could always have the possibility of harming Mississippi’s agriculture. This could lead to Mississippi’s agricultural production going downhill. 

Overall, Mississippi’s agriculture has been impacted harshly due to natural disasters. The global warming issues have impacted all kinds of farming in the industry including some farmers losing their lives to heat strokes, some losing livestock, and some having trouble with their crops. Sea levels rising causing flooding in coastal areas have also caused issues with crops, infrastructures, and homes. Runoff from crop dusters, weed killers, and other agricultural-related sprays has affected the water. Pollutants have caused drinking water to be contaminated. This is why Mississippi must take action to remedy this problem and push our state from simply surviving to thriving.