Okay, while Ohio-born Daniel Decatur Emmett, credited by most with the composition of the song known as "Dixie." wouldn't recognize those lyrics, it is what it is.
Corn is the cash crop king in the Mississippi Delta these days, adding a third "C" to the region's revenue producers. At one time, just like it says in the song, it was all about cotton ... then, catfish swam into the picture and now, corn.
Fields that not too many years ago would have produced bale after bale and left modules all along the roads, waiting to be loaded and hauled to the gins, on Saturday (May 7) had a beautiful stand of corn about three feet tall.
"Best looking corn in years," said Randy Hill as he and friend Roy Lee Cleveland prepped Good Hope Baptist Church for the coming flood. "And we've got this (the flood)."
My Daddy was a cotton farmer, managing two plantations — Red Gum, where we lived, and Good Luck, not too many miles as the crow flies from Good Hope. Daddy probably raised 2,000 acres or so of cotton, averaging better than two bales an acre with ease and as much as three bales in some years.
Daddy knew how to grow cotton — or just about anything else. Just as his ancestors had done, he watched nature's signs ... the moon, the clouds, the sunrises and sunsets. And he was successful as he grew cotton, soybeans, oats and wheat
Nowadays, there's nothing planted that my sister and I could see as we drove down Miss. Highway 14 past Red Gum. It's more profitable, you see, to sign papers with the government promising to not plant a crop than it is to battle the bugs and the elements and the markets and imports.
In fact, harvesting subsidies is pretty darn lucrative.
It should be noted that from 1995-2009, 59 percent of all farmers in Mississippi did not receive a subsidy. However, 10 percent of the farmers received 74 percent of the total paid out in the state.
Daddy worked for the Seward's ... however it was they structured their name. Best I remember, it was Seward & Son and from 1995-2009, they received subsidies (conservation, disaster and commodity) totaling $8,620,289 (Source: Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database*).
That's a lot of cotton at $750 a bale ... a lot of cotton. Another associated company, Seward & Harris Planting Co., received $8, 077,955 for not planting.
Wouldn't that make it the Seward & Harris non-Planting Co.?
We lived out from Louise, Miss., which had a 1960 population of about 475 people. It's smaller now, but nine farming companies ranking in the Top 50 subsidy recipients in Humphreys County harvested $32.8 million between 1995-2009.
Think about that.
No seed. No fuel. No equipment. No insects. No employment liability. Heck, now that the government has done away with paper checks, you don't even need a pen or deposit slip ... just a tolerance for the cha-ching of the subsidy slot machine.
No comments:
Post a Comment