Mississippi
In the Mississippi Delta, Hoping for Opportunity After a Ruinous Tornado
Two years into their marriage, Talia and Malissa Williams were working diligently to lay the groundwork for the rest of their lives together. Both were taking online college classes that could lead to stable careers. They had taken tentative steps toward adopting a child.
The couple had talked about settling permanently in Rolling Fork, the tiny Mississippi Delta hometown that Malissa had followed Talia back to a few years earlier. But the medical billing and coding jobs they’d been studying for weren’t likely to be found within an hour’s drive. Their older wooden house — essentially their least worst option in a town with a limited supply of rental housing — gave them nothing but problems.
Then came the tornado.
The house, gone. Their possessions — cars, clothes, computers — eviscerated in winds that reached 170 miles an hour, as the storm, the deadliest to hit Mississippi in more than a decade, tore through on the night of March 24.
Gone, too, was any incentive for them to stay.
“My heart is in Rolling Fork, it will always be there,” Talia, 42, said as she stood outside the motel room, 45 minutes’ drive away, that is serving as the couple’s temporary home. “But now this has happened, we have an opportunity,” she said.
As powerful storms raked across the Southeast on that night in March, Rolling Fork was shredded. Sixteen people were killed in the area. Dozens of families were forced into the same position as Talia and Malissa: Their homes were mangled, their lives upended in an instant.
But just like Talia and Malissa, many people in the community had already been navigating a slower-motion crisis for years, one that has swept the whole of the Mississippi Delta over decades of disinvestment and decline.
The devastation of this other disaster is manifest in the decaying homes and abandoned storefronts in the few areas of Rolling Fork left unscathed by the tornado, as well as in the city’s neglected infrastructure, entrenched poverty, struggling schools and troubling health statistics. The population of about 1,700 has been shrinking steadily for as long as most residents can remember.
“We were struggling to rebuild the town before the tornado,” said Angela Hall Williams, a longtime resident. She ticked off some of the things that had disappeared from Rolling Fork long before the storm, including decent-paying jobs, thriving stores, and any evidence of bustle.
The Delta — a pancake-flat expanse wedged between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in the northwestern part of the state — has long been defined by a contradiction. It is known for having some of the most fertile soil in the world, sustaining cotton, soybean and corn crops that for generations have been distributed around the world. But the bounty has rarely been shared in any meaningful way with the African American families who make up much of the population in the impoverished, hollowed-out communities that speckle the region, like Rolling Fork.
“You still see the vestiges of racial segregation, of economic segregation,” said Rolando Herts, the director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Miss. “We’re inheriting the decisions that were made years and years, decades and decades ago.”
The most viable solution for many Delta residents has been to leave. That was the case during the Great Migration, the mass exodus from the South of African Americans fleeing racist oppression and poverty during the 20th century. The population drain continued as increased mechanization of farming reduced the need for farm laborers and other types of industry fled the region.
Annie Lee Reed, 69, spent most of her life in Rolling Fork, but she was relieved when her children left town. The distance was difficult, but the alternative was worse. If they stayed, she said, “I knew they weren’t going to do nothing or make nothing.”
There are those who believe the tornado was not a nudge to flee, but an opportunity for Rolling Fork. In the immediate aftermath, Mayor Eldridge Walker assured the community that the city would “come back bigger and better than ever before.”
His argument was that the storm had drawn attention, and the prospect of investment, to the town. If not for the tornado, President Biden would never have flown in and promised the support of his administration. “Good Morning America” would never have broadcast live from Rolling Fork, or solicited donations for the town from viewers.
As cleareyed as Ms. Hall Williams was about what ailed Rolling Fork, she was among those who saw promise in the town. “It’s coming back,” she said confidently.
Her home was severely damaged by the storm, leaving Ms. Hall Williams and her husband to stay in a motel outside of town. But she was sketching out plans to open a restaurant serving her favorites: macaroni and cheese, catfish, brisket. She would be an employer, someone helping Rolling Fork survive, giving others incentive and resources to stay put.
“I’m not giving up,” Ms. Hall Williams said.
Henry Hood was far less sanguine. Two months after the tornado, the attention to the town had already faded. Assurances from elected officials were followed by a formal process for seeking government assistance that was so thick with bureaucratic and other hurdles that even the best of intentions were no match.
So far, he and Ms. Reed, his wife, had gotten $650 in federal emergency aid to fix a damaged car, and $1,200 from a church to repair their house, which had been handed down from Ms. Reed’s parents.
“It’s just going to be patched back up, little by little,” Mr. Hood said of his home. “There’s not going to be a remodeling and all that.”
His prediction: The same would be true for Rolling Fork.
The community was daunted by a bleak catalog of destruction: City Hall, the post office, the Police Department, both laundromats, the Family Dollar store, the convenience store that also had a decent menu of hot food.
There were also things that, while not essential to a functioning community, held deep value as the landmarks of home. Domonique Smith, who grew up in Rolling Fork, noticed the loss of the pear tree in the yard of a woman known as Miss Louise, which had long been harvested by neighborhood children.
Ms. Smith’s mother’s house had seemingly vaporized, its contents spread across the neighborhood. She found a single photograph of her father, who died when she was so young that she had no memories of him. A neighbor found a photo of Ms. Smith in her cap and gown, from when she was the valedictorian of her class at South Delta High School.
Now 35, she lives in Jackson, the state capital, almost 90 minutes away. But she said she had always found comfort in knowing her mother’s house, a safe haven, was there in Rolling Fork.
She returned to Rolling Fork on a recent Sunday because her family, at last, had something to celebrate. Her cousin, Ja’kiya Powell, had just graduated from high school, third in her class. The family gathered in another relative’s front yard, boasting of Ja’kiya’s accomplishment with a banner hanging from the front of the house.
Almost a year ago, Ja’kiya’s mother had moved to Texas, but Ja’kiya stayed behind, living with relatives. She wanted a normal senior year with her friends, something different from her school experience during the pandemic. The tornado hit the town just before her prom.
She was preparing to follow her mother and cousin out of Rolling Fork, starting at the University of Mississippi in the fall.
“There was a little taste of something before the tornado,” Ja’kiya, 18, said of her hometown. “Ain’t nothing now.”
A shadow Rolling Fork has sprouted in the collection of motels on Route 82 in Greenville, about 40 miles away, where the Red Cross is still distributing three meals a day and a shuttle bus totes residents back to town to clean up their property or just to be close to whatever is left of home.
Talia and Malissa Williams have mostly stuck to their room on the first floor of the Days Inn, which they share with Pee Wee, an ancient yet remarkably spry Chihuahua, and Bailey, a much younger pit bull.
They are waiting for government aid and possible temporary housing — a runway allowing them to save money and plot a future far from Rolling Fork. Talia still works as a home caregiver.
“It’s basically God,” Malissa, 43, said. “Wherever his direction is leading us, that’s where we’re going.”
Maybe it will be Tupelo, a city of 37,000 outside the Delta. Memphis, three hours north, could be an option, or somewhere in Texas, where Malissa’s brother lives.
In the quiet moments, an odd thought keeps surfacing. It is uncomfortable to articulate, given the heartache that surrounds the couple and all the disruption to their own lives. But that does not make it any less true.
“To me, it’s beautiful,” Malissa said. “I don’t know what else to say about it.”
There was the Nissan sedan parked outside their motel room, which they called their blessing. There were generous strangers, like the woman Malissa had met shopping at the Goodwill store in Greenville. The woman handed Malissa $60, then pulled it back and said God had commanded her to offer a $100 bill instead.
Malissa even found gratitude for the storm that had destroyed her home. It was the shove she and her wife needed, sending them toward the possibility of something better, somewhere else.
WARREN COUNTY, Miss. (WJTV) – There are questions about a bus company’s track record after a fatal bus crash in Mississippi on Saturday, August 31.
Seven people died when a passenger bus traveling on Interstate 20 left the roadway and overturned. The Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) said that 41 passengers and two drivers were enroute to Dallas from Atlanta.
Autobuses Regiomontanos owned the bus in the crash. The company, which is registered with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), has had a troubled record in recent memory. It consists of lawsuits, driver fitness violations and even another fatal crash in 2023.
According to the DOT, the company, based in Laredo, Texas, operates 17 vehicles and employs 39 drivers. The company currently has a ‘conditional‘ safety rating. It is given to companies with ‘inadequate‘ safety controls. Still, companies with this rating may continue to operate.
Its most recent compliance review occurred in July 2023. Using data available from the DOT’s Safety Management System, it has had 155 inspections. Of those inspections, 58 had violations. Nearly all were vehicle maintenance violations.
Three infractions between October and December of 2023 involved issues with vehicle tires. Other infractions included 16 brake or air brake violations and citations for having two buses with no or defective emergency exits.
Seven victims killed in Mississippi bus crash identified
Other inspection violations related to the bus company’s drivers. All violations occurred this year. They include the following:
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(1) Operating a commercial vehicle without corrective lenses or hearing aids as indicated on the driver’s medical certificate (2) Operating a commercial motor vehicle (CMV) while not possessing a valid commercial driver’s license (CDL).
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05/13/2024
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05/14/2024
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05/14/2024
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05/28/2024
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Operate a CMV while not in possession of a CDL on person.
DOT data indicates that company buses have been in four separate accidents over the last two years. A November 2022 crash required a bus to be towed away and another in April 2023 resulted in someone dying. Below is the record.
|
Date |
Location |
Deaths |
Injuries |
|
10/16/2023 |
Louisiana |
0 |
1 |
|
4/15/2023 |
Texas |
1 |
2 |
|
11/23/2022 |
Tennessee |
0 |
0 |
|
9/24/2022 |
Arkansas |
0 |
1 |
The NTSB is investigating the crash in conjunction with MHP. NTSB officials said they will look at the carrier’s safety record and protections for bus occupants.
Community comes together to help Mississippi bus crash victims
Autobuses Regiomontanos violated several provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), it failed to have an ADA training program in place for its employees and contractors, failed to file required ADA compliance reports and failed to ensure that all lifts on its buses were properly maintained.
In 2015, the company entered into a settlement agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
The company was also named as a defendant in a $708 million lawsuit filed by New York City City in January. The city accused Autobuses Regiomontanos and other charter bus and transportation companies of taking migrants to the Big Apple on behalf of the State of Texas.
The DOT advises travelers to do the following before they book their next bus trip.
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Search for bus companies
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Verify that a company is authorized to operate
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Review the company’s safety records
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Make sure the company is licensed and insured
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If appropriate, report a company
DOT agencies advise consumers that unless a motor carrier has received an unsatisfactory rating or has been ordered to discontinue its operations, it is authorized to operate on the nation’s roadways. Additionally, readers should not conclude that a carrier is safe or unsafe by only using data from DOT agencies. For more information, click here.
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Mississippi
As Climate Threats to Agriculture Mount, Could the Mississippi River Delta Be the Next California? – Inside Climate News
This story was originally published by The Tennessee Lookout.
A smorgasbord of bright red tomatoes and vibrant vegetables line the walls of Michael Katrutsa’s produce shop in rural Camden, Tennessee. What began a decade ago as a roadside farm stand is now an air-conditioned outbuilding packed with crates of watermelon, cantaloupe and his locally renowned sweet corn — all picked fresh by a handful of local employees each morning.
The roughly 20-acre farm west of the Tennessee River sells about half of its produce through his shop, with the rest going to the wholesale market.
Farms like Katrutsa’s make up just a sliver of roughly 10.7 million acres of Tennessee farmland largely dominated by hay, soybeans, corn and cotton. Specialized machines help farmers harvest vast quantities of these commodity “row crops,” but Katrutsa said the startup cost was too steep for him. While specialty crops like produce are more labor-intensive, requiring near-constant attention from early July up until the first frost in October, Katrutsa said he takes pride in feeding his neighbors.
The World Wildlife Fund sees farms in the mid-Mississippi delta as ripe with opportunity to become a new mecca for commercial-scale American produce. California currently grows nearly three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables.
Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season.
But as climate change compounds the threats of water scarcity, extreme weather and wildfires on California’s resources, WWF’s Markets Institute is exploring what it would take for farmers in West Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas to embrace — and equitably profit from — specialty crop production like strawberries, lettuce or walnuts.
Specialty crops make up only 0.19% of the region’s farm acreage, but their higher sale value allows them to generate 1.08% of the region’s agriculture revenue, according to WWF’s May report, called The Next California, spearheaded by Markets Institute Senior Director Julia Kurnik. She argues that there’s an opportunity to proactively create more inclusive, higher-yield business models on existing farms, preventing natural ecosystems from being unnecessarily transformed into farmland.
But shifting produce growth to the Mid-Delta comes with hurdles: it requires buyers willing to try new markets, understanding of new crops’ diseases and needs, specialized equipment like cold storage and lots of expensive hands-on labor.
“It is not as simple as a farmer simply putting new crops in the ground,” Kurnik said.
Early Adopters Put Idea to the Test
Sixth-generation Arkansas farmer Hallie Shoffner is putting WWF’s models to the test through a nonprofit called the Delta Harvest Food Hub. The hub works with Black and women farmers to pilot the scalability of growing specialty crops in the Delta region, starting with specialty rice.
Shoffner grows basmati, jasmine, sushi rice, sake rice seeds and more on her 2,000-acre, century-old farm located in an unincorporated town outside Newport, Arkansas. She’s skeptical about a full switch to produce, but sees specialty rice products as “low-hanging fruit” easily adopted in the mid-Delta, where commodity rice is already widely grown.
The United States is the fifth-largest rice exporter in the world, and Arkansas is the country’s top producer, with other Mississippi River valley states not far behind. But the majority of specialty rice is grown in California or imported from East Asian countries.
“We are forward-thinking farmers who want to change, who want to do something different,” Shoffner said. “We want to make more money, because we know we cannot make as much money as small farms in the current agricultural economy.”
The commodity farming that dominates Delta agriculture makes the economic success of farmers largely dependent on the market prices of rice, corn, soybeans, wheat and other crops, Shoffner said. This incentivizes farms to grow larger to ensure they turn a profit even when prices are low, like they are now. But smaller farms struggle to stay afloat.
Shoffner said her vision for developing specialty crop markets in Arkansas will be through more collaboration between many smaller farms to diversify crop production and produce for large contracts together. She’s also exploring possibilities for expanding chickpea, sunflower, sesame and pea production in Arkansas.
And while she’s at it, Shoffner is working to make agriculture more equitable.
“As a white farmer who is a sixth generation farmer, I realize that I have inherited a large amount of land that systematically disenfranchised Black farmers,” Shoffner said. “And it is my responsibility to acknowledge that, and leverage what I’ve been given to help others.”
Her project, Delta Harvest, has a contract to grow specialty rice with a large company and she’s working with several Black farmers. She was too small to do it by herself, so they are doing it cooperatively.
Finding the Right Markets
In Mississippi, efforts to shift some of California’s sprawling specialty crop industry to the Mid-Delta drew skepticism from some farmers—even those with established specialty crop operations.
For the past 20 years, Don van de Werken has co-owned a 120-acre blueberry and tea farm in Poplarville, Mississippi, distributing much of its crops to buyers in his county and nearby cities.
Van de Werken questioned whether there would be enough regional demand to sustain a scaled-up specialty crop industry in Mississippi, noting that the success of his own enterprise hinges on targeting hyper-local markets like New Orleans. Shipping vegetables, fruits and other produce to buyers outside the Delta region would quickly become cost prohibitive for local farmers, van de Werken said.
“The problem we have, not just in Mississippi but the mid South in general, is we just don’t have the population base,” said van de Werken, who is also president of the Gulf South Blueberry Growers Association. “We don’t want our blueberries to go to Maine or Seattle. We want to focus our produce in a regional market.”
To make growing specialty crops worthwhile, Mississippi farmers would need to identify nearby buyers willing to purchase the new products on a consistent basis, van de Werken said. While selling goods directly to retail grocery chains like Kroger is often difficult, farmers could reduce financial risks by signing purchasing agreements with regional brokers like Louisiana-based Capitol City Produce.
“Anybody that puts anything in the ground is already taking a risk, but you want to minimize that risk,” he explained. “If you can prove to the brokers and the buyers that they can make money doing this, then the farming will come.”
The WWF report investigates ways to distribute risk across the supply chain to make selling to new markets easier on farmers, and works to connect buyers with Mid-Delta farmers.
AgLaunch, a Memphis-based nonprofit that guides farmers in innovation, estimates that adding specialty crops to the Mid-Delta region could spur $4.6 billion in added revenue and 33,000 jobs. But while commodity crop prices are readily available on the Chicago Board of Trade, the specialty crop market is generally not so transparent. Large, vertically integrated companies usually dictate contract terms, AgLaunch President and farmer Pete Nelson said.
AgLaunch helps build “smart contracts” that allow multiple farmers to produce on a contract, helping them secure higher quantity deals with proper compensation as a collective.
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Purdue College of Agriculture professor Fred Whitford said the idea of farming cooperatives that help smaller farmers carve out space in a large-quantity market is more than 100 years old. Whitford compared commodity producers to retail giants like Walmart, which make money by selling in bulk. Small producers are more like Ace Hardware, he said.
“Maybe the smaller folks have an ability to make more off their land by going to a specialty crop,” he said.
New Challenges Need New Solutions
Farmers who embrace specialty crops will face hurdles before they make it to the market.
Growing produce can be more profitable but “easier said than done,” Whitford said. “It’s nice on paper … but boy, in reality, you’re going to have to keep an eye on this crop, whatever you’re growing, because one slip up … then you have lost a lot of money.”
In Tennessee, Katrutsa grew strawberries in addition to his other crops for 10 years, but last April, a hail storm pulverized his entire field, leaving him with nothing. He’s not growing strawberries this year, and he might not plant them again — he’s not sure if he can find enough labor to make it work.
He grows many types of produce so if one fails, it’s less catastrophic. He sources seedlings from a neighboring state (it’s cheaper than growing from seed) and plants five times each season to maximize yield.
He works with a consultant to help identify diseases and how to treat them. Tomatoes are the most challenging, Katrutsa said. Some of his tomato plants withered this year due to bacterial wilt that flourishes in wet soil and high temperatures and has few effective chemical remedies.
Carolyn Preble helps out farmer Michael Katrutsa at the farm shop, which stocks the more than 20 acres of produce Katrutsa grows in rural Camden, Tennessee. Credit: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout
Chemical treatments pose other challenges. In Shaw, Mississippi, Michael Muzzi relies on a range of herbicides to grow soybeans and other feed grains on his 2,000-acre farm. Once sprayed, herbicides like Liberty and Dicamba remain in the ground and can drift in the air, which is hazardous to specialty crops, like tomatoes, that aren’t resistant.
“You’re not going to be able to spray [those herbicides] on specialty crops,” Muzzi said. “You’d have to have something that’s chemically tolerant.”
Growing fruits and vegetables on a farm with previous heavy herbicide use would require insulating those crops from chemical runoff — a feat that could only be reliably achieved by leaving whole acres of land unused for years, he said.
AgLaunch is exploring innovative ways to address these problems. For some farmers, this means helping make their existing row crops more efficient using farmer-incubated technology, adding local value by growing specialty crops or taking on processing, Nelson said.
Then there’s disruption with higher risk: farmers can partner with agriculture automation technology startups, allowing them to field test their products and collect data in exchange for farmer equity in the startup companies. If the startup succeeds, the farmer shares in the benefits.
“It’s not as simple as, ‘Hey, we should grow tomatoes,’” Nelson said. “It’s how you think about the whole value chain and make sure the farmer is protected. Make sure it’s not an opportunity just to grow a crop, but it’s an opportunity to own part of the processing or to build new products.”
Kurnik said WWF isn’t trying to recruit farmers to start growing specialty crops – they just want Mid-Delta farmers to have the information they need to make informed decisions. In terms of acreage, row crops “dwarf” specialty crops in the United States. A small percentage shift would mean a significant change in the level of specialty crops in the Delta.
“We don’t need everyone to want to jump on board tomorrow,” she said. “They would flood the market if they did.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Disclosure: The Next California report was also funded by Walton.
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A 41-year-old man incarcerated at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County died Thursday of an apparent overdose.
Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain confirmed the death in a news release.
The man was identified as Juan Gonzalez. According to prison records, he was serving a four-year sentence on multiple convictions in Hinds County and was tentatively scheduled for release in May 2025.
“Because of the unknown nature of the substance, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and the Mississippi Department of Health were notified,” MDOC reported.
The investigation into Gonzalez’s death remains ongoing.
This is a developing story and may be updated.
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