Food’s next frontier
Can the mid-Mississippi Delta be an answer to some of the farming challenges the country is facing?
By
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Edward Wyatt
Photography by
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Ashleigh Coleman
Illustrations by
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Nick Slater
© WWF-US/Nick Slater c/o Folio Art
Fruits, nuts, and vegetables: They do a body good. Traditionally, such crops have been grown in California, where temperatures and weather systems are changing fast. That’s why WWF’s Markets Institute is looking closely at other places where those products might grow.
“The key elements to expand cultivation of products like these,” says Jason Clay, head of WWF’s Markets & Food program, “are abundant water; a well-connected location that makes it easy to transport produce to major city centers; a willing and able workforce; and, of course, existing farmland—so that no natural habitat needs to be converted for crops.”
The place that best fits that bill is the mid-Mississippi Delta, an area spanning eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, and northwestern Mississippi—a landscape that contains some of the most fertile agricultural land in the United States.
“We want to be thoughtful and proactive about where we’re growing our food,” says Julia Kurnik, WWF’s senior director for innovation startups. For the past several years, Kurnik has been working with farmers in the region to encourage the production of crops that are now largely grown in California. Her goal? To develop a farming system that’s an engine for economic development for the region—and that’s more supportive of farmers there.
The mid-Mississippi Delta is currently dominated by the cultivation of row crops, mainly soy and corn grown as animal feed. It’s a low-margin business that requires thousands of acres of production to turn a profit. It also depletes nutrients from the soil and requires significant herbicide use. Taking a portion of that acreage and devoting it to specialty crops like fruits, vegetables, legumes, and certain strains of rice—that people eat—can increase profits for farmers.
“It’s not about duplicating what exists in California,” says Kurnik. “It’s about fulfilling the delta’s potential.”
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
Since 2019, Kurnik has been working with a group of farmers, shippers, buyers, universities, and others to realize that vision. “Our goal is to convert 3% of acres across the delta from row crops to specialty crops within 10 years,” she says. “We’re currently at 0.19% of acres. If we reach 3%, we’ll see an additional 41% increase in revenue from farm sales across the region.”
This increase is because specialty crops, on average, realize about $6,000 per acre in revenue compared with about $800 per acre for commodity row crops.
“That doesn’t begin to account for value-added production that farmers can be doing as well,” she says, referring to freezing, canning, pureeing, and making sauces, chutneys, and salsas that bring in additional income and could lead to other opportunities for farmers in the region.
Meet some of those farmers now:
Shawn Peebles
Owner, Peebles Organics, Augusta, Arkansas
“When I was a child, we grew a lot of specialty crops,” says Shawn Peebles, resting on the tailgate of his pickup truck after a morning preparing a field for sweet potato seedlings. “Every farm in Arkansas had watermelons, and cantaloupes, sweet potatoes, sweet corn—there was so much diversification.”
But, Peebles says, his grandfather, like other farmers around him, stopped cultivating watermelons in the mid-1970s.
“We all switched to soybeans,” he says. “That’s what the government wanted us to do, and the policies that were in place promoted it.”
Over the next decade, Peebles explains, all the specialty crops just died away.
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
“There’s not a lot of support statewide, or in the whole delta, for these crops,” Peebles says. “When it comes to rice or soybeans, I can pull up the University of Arkansas data pages, and it’ll tell me exactly what to do and when to do it. But I can’t do that with pumpkins or other specialty crops.”
This makes it harder for farmers to get involved in specialty crop farming, he says, despite the land being perfect for it.
“You name it—you probably have any soil texture you can find in the world right here in the delta,” he says, listing just a few types found in the region: pure sand, heavy gumbo, clay, and silt loam. “There aren’t many other places where you can grow the type of crops you can grow here.”
And with prices low for commodity row crops, specialty crops could be having a moment.
“The biggest challenge in getting people to look at diversified crops as an option is a generational issue,” says Peebles. “People think: ‘My grandfather did it this way. My dad did it this way. We’re going to continue doing it this way.’”
That mentality must change, he says with a smile.
Matthew Robinson
Owner, The Produce Tribe, Stanton, Tennessee
In a typical year, Matthew Robinson farms over 30 different varieties of vegetables—including squash, zucchini, broccolini, kale, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and sweet corn—primarily to sell in Memphis farmers’ markets.
“I think specialty crops are important because that’s what we eat every day,” he says, noting that shipping produce from the West Coast is an inefficient model because of the cost, carbon footprint, and refrigeration needs. “There are local areas that can produce the same amount of specialty crops.”
But specialty crops require special considerations. They don’t have a long shelf life. They require cold storage, including during transportation, which isn’t the case for row crops that can be sold to mills in the area.
Citing California’s ongoing water challenges, he says, “It doesn’t make sense to burden the land and the resources in California when we have them here. Why are we trucking things from California or New York to Tennessee or Missouri when they can all be grown here?”
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
Hallie Shoffner
CEO of Delta Harvest, Newport, Arkansas
“Right now, every [row-crop] commodity in Arkansas is losing money on every single acre, and that’s not sustainable for farmers,” says Hallie Shoffner. Farmers are looking for new ways to continue farming, she explains, because that’s the job they love.
Her organization, Delta Harvest, is a mission-based enterprise that helps farmers—particularly small farmers—secure higher-value contracts for their products, allowing them to become more financially resilient.
Arkansas is the top rice-producing state in the country, notes Shoffner, with granaries, mills, and transportation. “The issue,” she says as she wades shin-deep into a rice paddy on her farm, “is that we mostly grow rice for export. What if we could capture specialty rice contracts for American-grown jasmine or basmati that pays the farmer a premium?”
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
She explains that 25% of all the rice eaten in the United States is considered specialty, but most of those types are imported from Thailand and India. “We can grow really good alternatives,” Shoffner says. “So why are we not capturing that market? That’s just money left on the table for Arkansas farmers.”
But she also acknowledges that growing food for the US market in Arkansas would take a fundamental shift in thinking—from people in the state and federal governments and from the farmers themselves.
“I would argue that the future of the delta economy is the future of the United States economy because this is where we will eventually be able to grow our food,” she says.
Harvey Williams
Cofounder and CEO of Delta Dirt Distillery, Helena, Arkansas
Harvey Williams grew up on a farm about 20 miles from his distillery. His great-grandfather, and then his grandfather and his father, farmed that land. Now Williams and his brothers have taken over.
“The idea of a distillery using the ingredients that we grow on our farm, to build a business—and a brand—was ideal,” he says.
As a vegetable farmer, Williams’s father would go to conferences to keep up with what was happening in the industry. In 2016, he attended a conference with Williams’s youngest brother, and the latter returned excited about the potential of sweet potatoes.
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
“He saw anything you could imagine—breads, pies, turnovers, little Tater Tots® made of sweet potatoes,” Williams says. “And as excited as he was about all those things, what really intrigued him was sweet potato vodka.”
What followed was a period of learning.
Standing next to the gleaming distillery tanks, he lists the questions that came up as they began to research: “What are the regulatory barriers? What kind of equipment do we need?” And then there were realizations: “We had to get a license,” he says. “We had to pick a location and then build out a distillery. We had to figure out how to create a brand and market it and advertise it and really create something that people would want to have.”
And that is exactly what they did.
“We built something that’s award-winning and noteworthy,” Williams says. “Something to be shared.”
Pete Nelson
President, AgLaunch, Memphis, Tennessee
Last year, AgLaunch—the platform that connects the farmers in this article—worked with farmers in eastern Arkansas to test a new piece of technology: a robot that scans a field and extricates weeds as it traverses rows of crops. That pilot project encapsulates AgLaunch’s vision and mission: to use technology to make global food systems work in a way that’s equitable for farmers, processors, wholesalers, retailers, and others—and that unlocks innovation across the supply chain.
Pete Nelson, who founded the company, believes new markets can drive that change and emphasizes the need for more diversity of crops, a focus on health outcomes for the crops produced, and better markets. As an added benefit, the farmers who try out a new technology receive equity in the company that created it.
“We are creating an innovation ecosystem that’s vibrant, using technology and crops to the benefit of a community,” he says. “The delta is the perfect place to show how that can work.”
© WWF-US/Ashleigh Coleman
WITH GRATITUDE for their generous support of WWF’s work to build a sustainable and equitable commercial-level specialty crop industry in the Mississippi Delta: Helen G., Henry F. & Louise Tuechter Dornette Foundation | Green Park Foundation | Heron Foundation | Walton Family Foundation
© Sarah Mosquera / WWF-US
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