Danny Hargett planted corn and, for the first time, no cotton on his land in Mississippi. Photo credit: James Patterson for The New York Times
A version of this article appeared in print on May 6, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: May 5, 2009
GREENWOOD, Miss. — Cotton is no longer king of the Mississippi Delta.
Farmers working land that has bloomed a dazzling snowy white every September since before the Civil War are switching to corn and soybeans. As gleaming silver corn silos go up on farm after farm, cotton gins are laying off workers or shutting down.
“We’re closer than we’ve ever been to looking like Iowa,” said Danny Hargett, a veteran farmer who has decided for the first time not to grow any cotton this year on his 3,000 acres of fertile, well-irrigated land. “It was extremely hard for me to make this decision, but the economics have made it almost impossible to make cotton a profitable crop.”
The most immediate cause of King Cotton’s decline is that people around the world are buying less clothing and home furnishings. Global cotton production and consumption are dropping, and the Agriculture Department expects the nation’s exports to fall by $1.2 billion this year.
Cotton growers have seen hard times before, of course. As with other commodities, prices and acreage have gone up and down on economic cycles. But cotton farmers and farm economists say they have never seen a downturn quite like this, one that started during the global boom and has quickened in the recession.
The Agriculture Department estimates that 8.8 million acres of cotton will be planted in the United States this year, down 7 percent from 2008 and 42 percent from 2006.
It will be the lowest cotton acreage since 1983, an anomalous year when farmers cut acreage after a string of bountiful harvests that created a surplus.
Nowhere has the slump been greater than in Mississippi, where farmers decreased their cotton planting to 365,000 acres in 2008, from 1.2 million acres in 2006. A survey suggested that could fall to 268,000 acres this year.
Meanwhile, the number of gins in the state has dropped to 71, from 89 in 2006, said Darrin Dodds, an extension service agronomist at Mississippi State University, who predicts this year, “we may lose a few more.”
Cotton acreage has been declining in Mississippi for decades, but it remained the crop of choice for many farmers in the Delta, the fertile region in the northwestern part of the state, where the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers share a flood plain.
Not everyone is likely to feel nostalgia for a crop long associated with abject work conditions and low wages. Though a source of wealth, cotton was also a source of back-breaking work for slaves and sharecroppers, and later for poor farm laborers.
Early in the 20th century, the travail of picking cotton in the blazing Delta sun was a touchstone theme for the blues musicians of the region. Later, mechanization in the cotton fields contributed to several waves of black migration from the South to industrial cities of the North, and to high rates of unemployment for those left behind. These days, cotton is rarely picked by hand — machines do the work.
Cotton’s cultural roots are still on display around Greenwood, where visitors are welcomed by a sign proclaiming it “Cotton capital of the world.” Some people plead with farmers to keep planting cotton beside the roads, considering it prettier than other crops, and fearing that corn stalks will obstruct drivers’ vision on curved roads.
“It’s a funny sense, a different sense, not seeing the cotton crop,” said Mike Sturdivant Jr., a farmer who has cut his cotton crop to 2,400 acres this year, from 4,900 in 2007. “I don’t like it.”
The rapid slump of cotton in the United States has been influenced by numerous factors, including weather and the plummeting fortunes of the American textile industry. But lately, the most important factor has been the declining profitability of cotton farming, in contrast to the rising profitability of corn and soybean farming.
Poor canola harvests in Europe and dietary changes in several countries produced a world shortage of vegetable oil, pushing up the price of soybeans, which are crushed for their oil. Meanwhile, as middle classes grew in China, India and other developing countries, demand for feed grains grew, and world corn prices rose.
“Globalization has dethroned King Cotton without question, not only in Mississippi, but throughout the South and the United States,” said O. A. Cleveland, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at Mississippi State.
Expanding federal mandates for ethanol prompted farmers to plant more corn to keep up with its growing role as an energy feedstock. Also, new corn strains have made the crop more practical in Mississippi’s hot climate.
Since 2003, cotton prices have declined nearly 23 percent, while prices for soybeans are up more than 38 percent and corn nearly 65 percent. Cotton surpluses have been stacking up around the globe in part because of rising yields from genetically modified cotton seeds and other technological improvements.
Those trends are leaving farmers and cotton gin owners feeling pessimistic.
With the textile mills that make clothes “leaving the country to where the labor is cheaper, it’s not very smart to think we can grow the commodity here so they can make a shirt in China,” said Walter Reese Pillow IV. He followed in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather in growing cotton — until 2006, when he and his family converted their cotton fields to corn and soybeans.
“The prospects for cotton coming back here are about as good as the mills coming back to South Carolina,” Mr. Pillow said.
Jason Colquett, owner of the Crossroads Gin, said his plant ginned 33,000 bales of cotton in 2006, 24,000 in 2007 and 15,000 in 2008. He does not expect to reach 10,000 this year. That has meant a loss of jobs, as it has at other gins across the state. Mr. Colquett’s repair crew has dropped to four full-time workers, from nine, and his ginning season has been reduced to 30 days, from 90.
“I can imagine Mississippi without cotton gins,” Mr. Colquett said. “It’s not a pretty picture.”
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