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:

• (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).

  • 05/13/2024

  • 05/14/2024

  • 05/14/2024

  • 05/28/2024

• 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.

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.

• Search for bus companies

• Verify that a company is authorized to operate

• Review the company’s safety records

• Make sure the company is licensed and insured

• 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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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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.