Team 2: Story 2: Climate Change and its Effects on Mississippi Agriculture

History and Background.

On a warm Friday afternoon in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a woman notices a long line of cars spilling out into the street as they wrap around the drive-through lane of a local express restaurant named Goldie’s. Realizing that the flurry of activity must mean that crawfish are available at the restaurant, she joins the line in hopes of grabbing a few pounds for her son to enjoy on his birthday. Reaching the speaker, she puts in an order for five pounds of the juicy crawfish, and upon reaching the window, she is told that she owes forty dollars plus tax. The woman is shocked, but it is too late to back out, and she hands over her card.

It’s hard to go anywhere in Mississippi during the warm spring months without stumbling across a variety of things: vast fields of corn and cotton, signs advertising fresh crawfish by the pound and shops with tractors parked nearby, to name a few. It is a sign of the Magnolia State’s rich history in agriculture and the prevalence of farming-related jobs that still exist today.

However, this could all be threatened due to the impact of climate change. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency climate change is caused by greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, being released into the atmosphere through human activity. The boom in the use of factories during the Industrial Revolution caused a massive increase in these gasses, and there has been no slowing down. Think about it: in a world that relies on factory manufacturing for everything — cars, clothes, furniture, tools and the list goes on — it is hard to limit the high volume of gasses that reach the Ozone layer.

What are the impacts of climate change, and why do they matter for Mississippi’s farming scene? NASA lists some of the harmful impacts that are already being observed around the world. Perhaps the most noteworthy change that we can expect is a dramatic increase in temperatures. This does not mean that some days might be hotter than others, instead, it suggests that global temperatures will reach a much higher average. Sea levels are also expected to rise, impacting locations located along nationwide beaches.

Another potentially less well-known effect of climate change, but arguably the biggest, is the potential for an increase in the intensity of natural disasters. Hurricanes and other forms of severe storms could become more violent, wildfires could spread farther and last longer, the potential for flooding in some areas can increase, severe droughts can linger for months on end and crops will feel the effects of a shorter season of frost and a longer growing season.

Almanac.com details the most important planting times for Mississippi’s 53 primary crops. According to the website, the last official day to plant the seeds for the majority of these crops falls in either July or August. Mississippi summers are increasingly warm, and the state has been struck by extreme droughts for months on end for years. That raises plenty of questions about how effectively crops are planted. How difficult is it to place the seeds in the parched ground? Can the seeds even be properly nourished through human measures in the absence of rain? These questions might be rhetorical, but they give a small glimpse into the number of problems that farmers face when growing crops.

Crawfish are less of a need and more of a delicacy for those who wish to consume them, but many people along the Gulf Coast make a living by harvesting the small crustaceans. These freshwater creatures heavily populate the marshes and river basins of southern Mississippi and Louisiana. Harvesting can sometimes begin near the end of the calendar year, with the main crawfish season falling during the warm spring months and into the early part of summer.

There’s only one problem… this year, the South has seen one of the worst crawfish shortages in history. There has been a much lower supply than in years past, and many of the available crawfish are much smaller than normal, leading to a dramatic increase in prices. Why is this happening? According to Roby Chavez in communication with PBS severe droughts and high temperatures have been the main impacts of climate change that have affected crawfish. Warmer water has limited growth, and many have burrowed deeper than normal in search of cooler temperatures and moisture in the mud. What’s more, the rice plants that the mudbugs typically feed on were also damaged by the drought.

Mississippi State has long been a major force in the world of agriculture from a university standpoint. According to Niche, MSU is the best agriculture school in the Magnolia State and the 25th-best overall. The university boasts the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which houses 52 undergraduate majors across nine departments.

One specific department — the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences — is housed in Dorman Hall on MSU’s Starkville campus. Within this building is the office of Dr. Prakash Jha, an assistant professor of agricultural climatology. Jha studies the direct link between the drastically-changing climate and agriculture from a local and national standpoint and focuses on a few specific areas for his research. “I do research in disease forecast warning, climate impact on crop production, livestock… so overall, climatology work I do here,” Jha said. The professor explained that there are two main climate factors that heavily impact farming in Mississippi and across the Southeast.

“When we talk about the climate impact on agriculture, we need to think on a system approach rather than a crop approach,” Jha said. “There is an impact in two factors: temperature and precipitation. Last two [or] three decades we have seen a lot of variabilities in rainfall distribution. We have [an] infinite amount of rainfall in the preseason, and in the midseason we have [a] difference in rainfall, kind of drought conditions, so that is a major challenge, and in terms of temperature, we have a major challenge of heat waves during peak crop-growing season.”

Jha also described the impact that these factors can have on crawfish, explaining that gasses released from biomass — organic matter that produces energy — play a major role in the difficulties that surrounded the crustacean this year. “The more carbon dioxide, there will be more biomass for emissions, so it’s a normal terrain for any kind of crop species,” Jha said. “However, if we have [imbalance] in carbon and nitrogen ratio, we have seen that that has differences in the protein content.”

Not only is climate change making it difficult to grow crops and raise crawfish… it has also shown to be detrimental to the health of humans. Jha continued, adding how the biomass affects more than just the viability of crawfish: “We have seen for rice cultivation in [the] Delta region, where we have high [carbon dioxide] is linked with high arsenic content in the rice; toxicity of cadmium and arsenic in the rice. People like you and me, if we will consume that kind of rice down the line, the major impact of climate change we will see [is] we will have more toxicity of cadmium and arsenic if we do not mitigate that. So that is the kind of nutrition we see, especially for fruits and vegetables.”

This is not just a problem in Mississippi: crops all across the country are losing nutrients and seeing a rise in unpleasant chemicals due to climate change. Even crop imports from states such as California or Florida pose just as high of a risk when consumed.

As an expert in his field, Jha does believe that “There will be significant changes in terms of impact, but why we are talking about less impact is because of a lot of innovations we have done,” Jha said. “In terms of agriculture research, there are a lot of technologies which we call as climate resilient illusions. That can minimize impact for long term. However, there is a consequence impact of climate change down the line in fifty or one hundred years, but there are a lot of innovations under the universities, assistantships, USDAs where you will see the benefits of those technologies to minimize impact.”

How is this impact minimized?

“There are two terms: adaptation and mitigation,” Jha said. “Mostly in the [agriculture] sector, we talk about adaptation: how to change planting we do, how to minimize or maximize fertilizer water use… those kind of strategies are called adaptive strategies, and those are short term — two years, three years. For long term, we need to think of mitigation strategies. For [agriculture] sector, we talk much about covered crops, which helps in long-term carbon sequestration. That is a mitigation approach for the next forty, fifty, one hundred years.”

What would happen if these mitigation efforts were ineffective, or if there were too many short-term solutions put in place for long-term problems? What would happen if the agriculture industry in Mississippi took a deep dive due to climate change, with no chance of ever recovering?

Agriculture is a major market in the South. The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce recognizes that it is the top industry in the Magnolia State and estimates that roughly 17.4 percent of the state’s workforce works in agriculture in some way. If climate change were to completely limit the ability of crops to be planted in the state, then one-fifth of working adults would suddenly find themselves with no way to support themselves or their families.

Farmers themselves would obviously be the most heavily impacted. Their entire livelihoods would be completely lost, and there would be no easy way to recover. Acres of crops would lay desolate, with no backup plan in place. The acres of land could possibly be sold, but not for agriculture; rather, it would likely be bought up by contractors simply looking for space to add new homes and businesses. A farmer could live on that paycheck for a little while, but what would happen once he or she needed a new job and had to start all over?

Likewise, crawfish harvesters on the coast would find it impossible to recover if water temperatures reached a point that made it impossible for crawfish to thrive at the level that they always have. They might not lose as much in terms of land, but they would be in the same predicament as traditional agriculture farmers.

Farmers of all types might suffer the most from the effects of climate change on agriculture, but the domino effect would never stop. Companies such as John Deere that produce tractors and other machinery would take a hit, as would chain stores such as Lowe’s and Home Depot. Local businesses within small farming communities would struggle to make ends meet. Farmers markets and certain festivals could be a thing of the past.

Grocery stores and restaurants across the nation would see a decrease in the amount of available produce, but the demand for agricultural products would only rise. The cost of purchasing these goods to use in stores and restaurants would skyrocket to combat demand, which would in turn make them much more expensive for consumers to purchase.

This brings a second, but equally important, group of people into the mix. Those looking to purchase a fresh salad at a restaurant or some carrots at a grocery store would suddenly have to pay at least a little bit more than they would have in the past. A few extra cents or dollars here or there might not seem like a big deal to some, but that would undoubtedly add up over time. Eventually, there would be a divide among consumers: some would be willing to spend the extra money and have to limit spending elsewhere in some way, others would purchase these goods less frequently.

One of Mississippi’s biggest crops that seems to sometimes taken for granted is cotton. According to MDAC, there were 780 cotton farms across the state’s 82 counties in 2022, and they produced roughly 1.13 million bales of cotton. These bales went on to produce hundreds of thousands of products, ranging from clothes to sheets and pillowcases. If Mississippi’s rich soil became dried out and was never able to produce the same amount of cotton as in months past, then producers and consumers would face many of the same problems listed above.

What can we do to prevent climate change? At this point, it is impossible to reverse the damage that has already been done. Chemical gasses from the burning of fossil fuels, exhaust from cars and semi-trucks and pollutants filling the air from large factories are still being pushed into the atmosphere at an extreme rate each day. On top of that, deforestation has limited nature’s ability to re-absorb the mass amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even by switching to clean, renewable energy forms — solar energy, wind energy and ocean energy, to name a few — there will always be gasses entering the atmosphere to some extent.

What we can do is each do our individual parts to slow the effects of climate change. According to Northwestern University, there are nine simple things that everybody can do that could drastically slow down climate change and global warming. We can change lights to limit the production of carbon dioxide, choose to walk or bike rather than driving constantly, recycle waste, use products with less wasteful packaging and keep our tires completely aired up to ensure that we receive better gas mileage, thus consuming fewer gallons of gasoline. In households, we can turn off our electric devices, use cooler water for shorter periods of time and adjust our thermostat by just a few degrees as the seasons change. Lastly, if all else fails, we can choose to simply plant a tree. The earth cannot be completely healed, but its life can be prolonged significantly through these small changes.

Agriculture is far too important of an industry across the United States to lose completely to the effects of climate change one day, and Mississippi’s thriving agriculture industry is much of what keeps the state and its residents afloat. Without it, the entire landscape of the Magnolia State will change beyond recognition and the millions of people across the nation that consume its products will suffer.

Email the team at ew1159@msstate.edu with any questions

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