When talking to farmers in Mississippi in 2023, no matter the producer or what they produce, you’ll hear the same thing.

“It’s all we’ve ever done is cattle, but I’ve never seen any situations like this,” said David Tadlock, owner of one of the largest livestock auctions in Mississippi, Tadlock’s Stockyard.  “It’s dry.  People have got nothing for the cattle to eat.”

“I’ve been here for 28 years in this part of the world, you know checking crops, and I basically have a new scale of what burned up is,” said Trey Bullock, south Mississippi crop consultant.

“I’ve never seen it this bad.  My dad and all the old timers, we’ve never seen it this dry and this hot, you know,” said Blake Ryals, Walthall County dairy farmer.  I asked all the old guys at the coffee shop in the morning, like have you ever seen it this hot and dry?  No.  They never have you know.”

“I’ve been farming 45 years and this is the worst I’ve ever seen it, and I had some dry years now,” said Denny Denam, Walthall County farmer and business owner.

Though the extreme temperatures and lack of rain affects everyone, it’s impact on those who depend on the land for their living has been significant. The majority of agriculture – from central Mississippi to the Gulf Coast – is now under exceptional drought conditions, the highest stage of the U.S. Drought Monitor. In the cattle business, that has resulted in producers taking some drastic measures. With dried up ponds and no grazing land due to scorched fields, they are selling off their herds.

“The prices are good.  That’s the only good thing about it, but these older people that are in the cattle business, they’re going to the barn and hadn’t gotten anything for the cows to eat,” said Tadlock.  “And they’re saying, the heck with it, we’re just going to sell the cows, and most of them that sell them won’t get back into business.”

And for those who do come back?

“With the drought stress and the short pastures and the low weights on the cattle, the conception on the mama cows, it’s going to hurt that and that’s going to create a shorter supply of calves for the next year,” Alton Harvey, stockyard manager.  “And even the pasture grasses and the hay of grasses and stuff, 80 percent of it, I believe, is dead.  I’d be surprise if it comes back next year.”

For row crop farmers – from peanuts to cotton to soybeans – the yields are down by half. That is if you make a crop.

“It literally (I’ve never seen it) cooked the bolls.  They split prematurely and, you know, that’s kind of what I was showing her, a picture, I mean of that plant, but they’re no good,” said Bullock. “The cotton opened up prematurely, so the lint was no good.  The seed’s no good.  I don’t know if a picker can even get most of it.”

“I tell a lot of people I’ve got just enough irrigation to be tired and broke,” said Van Hensarling, south Mississippi cotton farmer.  “You know, we probably got about five or six hundred acres of irrigated ground on twenty‑six hundred.”

The financial impact from operation to operation will be great.

“If you owe any money, it’s devastating and, you know, I’ve been doing it long enough to thank the Lord I don’t owe any, but if I did, I mean I could not continue and, this year, we’re going to cut back and just do the wheat as I was talking to you about and next summer take off,” said Denam.  “We’re not going to do any summer crops, yeah so.”

“Equipment, you know, is extremely high; a cotton picker an example,” said Bullock.  “I mean it’s a million dollar machine and we’re going to have to run that million dollar machine and wear it out this year through, hopefully, a hundred fifty to two hundred pound cotton, which is you know just wear and tear on a picker, but you’re not getting enough to justify even running it.

Blake Ryals runs this dairy with his father just outside of Tylertown, Mississippi. They keep grain bins full of corn and soybeans for feed, and it’s a good thing.

“They’re a total loss on soybeans.  They can’t handle the dry weather.  So, we try to grow everything.  I mean we feed the cattle.  So, whether it’s corn, soybeans, grain for corn, you know, so we try to do it all ourselves here.” said Ryals.  Well, you get a drought like this, you better hope you got a stockpile of it, the grain in the bins, you know storage capability to hold all that so, and we do.”

But even at night, the goal for Ryals is keeping the cows cool, so milk production will improve.

“Milk production went kind of south, but it’s starting to pick back up now that we’re getting some cooler temperatures at night you know so, which has really helped out a lot so,” said Ryals.

As for what the future holds, most will simply wait…and pray for rain.

“We really don’t know.  There’s some cotton out there,” said Hensarling. “We don’t know what the grade is.  It may not be enough to really cover the expense of gathering it.”

“We’re going to have to get a good amount of rain through the winter and it’s going to probably take a couple of years to get the moisture back in the ground,” said Harvey.

“Some of them didn’t harvest anything on soybeans and we did harvest some,” said Denam.  “So, anyway, it’s been about as tough as it could hopefully get, you know.  It may get tougher, but I don’t know how.”