Cody Parker: “You know, you just about want to cry.”
All Central Mississippi row crop farmer Cody Parker could do was watch as torrential rains continued to pelt his corn, soy beans and cotton. Parker stood by as the water rose across his fifteen hundred acres within weeks of harvest. He estimates ten to twelve inches in a matter of days.
Cody Parker: “Right up the road up here, yesterday was worse than I’ve ever seen on anything I’ve ever farmed. And it rose all day long till I finally left. It was halfway up and then before it was over with you couldn’t hardly tell it was a cotton field. Nothing but water. And then we looked up and you see a deer swimming across the top of it.”
Today, as Parker surveys the fields with Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation Regional Manager Kevin Brown, water still runs through the rows. He hopes his hard work and extra income to this point won’t be in vain.
Cody Parker: “We’ve spent all, you know, of course, expenses, I don’t have to tell you, is up. Everything has costed us so much to do. We had probably one of the better crops we’ve ever had. And then this. It’s just devastating to me. And I mean, we don’t know what we’re looking at. We don’t know until it’s over with, I don’t know how bad to tell you it’s going to be.”
Just like Parker’s land, many counties across the state are seeing swollen creeks and flooded fields. The Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation and the state Department of Agriculture stand with farmers and land owners as they dry out and wait for harvest, if there is a harvest.
GFX Commissioner Gipson Statement:
From Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson.
“Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been traveling throughout the entire State of Mississippi, and almost every day it’s been raining everywhere I’ve been. This unusually wet August weather comes at the exact time our farmers really need to be in the field harvesting this year’s crop or baling hay for winter forage. These rains and floods are preventing the necessary work. The flooding has been devastating for so many throughout Mississippi, but there is no greater impact of the intense rain than the impact on our Mississippi farmers. It’s a very clear reminder of exactly why we need to support our farmers, such as the effort to finish the pumps in the South Delta where entire farming communities experienced months-long floods in 2019 and 2020. We stand ready to assist in any need for disaster declarations, and we join all Mississippians in praying for drier weather for the remainder of the harvest season.”
Kevin Brown: “what we’ll be doing right now, just reassuring them that they have a friend and an ally that’s going to advocate on their behalf, to let the proper agencies know that this is a disaster. We’ll do anything we can to help them as far as acreage reporting and getting the information needed to them, what they need to do to declare it a disaster and get some reprieve to help offset their losses.”
Now the difficult part, all farmers can do is pray the rain stops and the fields dry out. Then, its do what farmers always do…get back to work.
Cody Parker: “It’s gotten to be more and more with the weather. And the thing is, we can’t control it. I could sit here moan and groan and cry and fuss and cuss and ain’t a darn thing we can do about it. And it’s going to work. One way or another we going to have to make it work.”