Delta area farmers raise concerns over current commodity prices 

Delta farmers had a positive spring beginning with great weather and plenty of planting time, but then the rains came—and kept coming.  This caused many farmers to replant some acreage, lose some acreage and cause wildly different yields across the board.

Farmers across the area have been harvesting corn, rice, soybeans and cotton—each crop assuaged with problems ranging from pests, weather, and historically low commodity prices. 

Corn

Mississippi State Extension Corn Specialist, Dr. Erick Larson notes corn farmers had the best planting season due to the fact corn is generally planted first.  

“In general, the corn planting went fairly well this past spring,” says Larson. “We had some planting windows in late March and Easter week primarily. And we had some days at the end of April, but after that we had no planting opportunities for the first three to four weeks in May. That affected all the crops planted after corn.”

Larson notes the growing season was good, but there were plenty of problems.

“May and June were more abnormal weather wise and that caused problems with herbicide application and the rain did delay and restrict acreage, particularly in the Northeastern part of the state,” he says. “We had some speedling emergency issues associated with saturation or flooding, rootless corn syndrome, hail damage, delayed and restricted fertilizer and herbicide application. We had corn that had substantial nitrogen deficiency either because of application delays or extended soil saturation causing considerable losses.”

The list of problems continued.

“There was stunting due to soil compaction resulting from traffic when the soils were minted, and we had green snap problems,” says Larson. “It’s a strange phenomenon where corn stalks are snapped during the mid to late vegetative stages due to high winds. And that’s a problem because it always snaps below where the ear is going to be formed. Any stalks that snap are basically rendered barren. And that doesn’t happen very often, but when it does happen, it can have catastrophic yield loss because of that.”

However, Larson says corn had good yields, fairly equivalent to last year, which had high yields.

“The crop was good in the Delta and during the beginning of September, harvest was still going on in the North Delta,” he says “The yields are up and down and highly variable depending upon nitrogen-related issues.” 

Corn acreage was up this season with 920,000 acres nearly doubling the 2024 planted acreage of 490,000, according to the USDA National Ag Statistic Service numbers.

“We haven’t had that high of acreage since 2007. In fact, we haven’t had over 900,000 acres since 1960,” says Larson.  

Soybeans

With all of the planting problems which occurred during May, soybean acreage was down with 2.050 million acres planted. There were 2.3 million acres planted in 2024. Justin Calhoun, the Mississippi State Extension Soybean specialist, says it’s been a “very strange year.”

“We’ve had good harvest weather and everything has gone smoothly, which is what we needed,” says Calhoun. “But I’m afraid that the overall crop is going to be off pace of where we really want. I’ve talked to some farmers who were close to finishing in September and others still had a lot out there. It’s been a really tough year. I’ve been called and asked about acreage reports and planning progress and now harvest progress. It is incredibly tough all the way around this year.” 

Rice

Acreage decreased for rice as 155,000 acres were planted in 2024 and only 130,000 planted in 2025. Will Eubank, Mississippi State Extension Rice Specialist, explains rice farmers had more than enough problems to work through this growing season, and harvest is bearing them out.

“Harvest started the second week of August, maybe some people got in the first week of August,” says Eubank. “There were really good yields from early planting with good reports all across the board. RiceTec and Downing Grove’s Clearfield variety are showing really good yields. But then as we moved into that later planting, the issues we had to deal with including drifting and heavy rains early in the spring, that’s when we started hearing some concerning things regarding yields.”

Delays in spreading herbicide and fertilizer compromised the later planted crops.

“It wasn’t necessarily just the rain,” says Eubank. “It was more the delays in herbicide application. That was kind of the big concern midway through the season. The main yield reducer has been the stem split or twin stem. It’s basically when the rice puts on a tiller at a nodal position, so you have nose up to the rice plant and it basically reduces your yield because that rice head that comes out of the nodal is so much later maturing and the rice is not putting as much effort into that main stem as it is into that split stem,” he says.

The yields have varied with “the top end of the field typically is our yield limiting zone where we would expect to be 180 to 200 bushels, whereas in the bottom, where it’s supposed to be consistent, we’re hearing 100 to 150 bushels to the acre,” notes Eubank.

Pests were also a problem as a new rice pest, the Delphacid, has been found in Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. 

“It’s here,” says Eubank. “I don’t know if it’s here to stay, but it’s something we’re going to have to deal with, maybe not necessarily this year, just because we have some of our rice getting out of the field early—so luckily in some cases it’s past that damaging stage.” 

Cotton

Once King of the Delta turnrow, cotton was riding higher in 2024 with 520,000 acres planted but dipped to 360,000 for 2025. At press time, some harvest of cotton had begun according to Mississippi State Extension Cotton Expert Brian Pieralisi.

“There’s a little bit of picking going on in the Delta just north of 82 in Tallahatchie County and Leflore County area,” says Pieralisi, “But not a whole lot. There’s a fair amount of defoliation going out. So, the very earliest planted, which was in late April, has been defoliated and is very near picking or being picked.”

The later planted cotton crops got in the ground in late May and June and should be ready for harvest in mid to late October, according to Pieralisi. He notes there were probably three plantings for cotton, spreading out the problems for each. 

Mississippi State Extension’s Tyler Towles, Research Entomologist, Whitney Crow, Extension Entomologist, Don Cook, Entomologist and Tom Allen, Extension Plant Pathologist, have all been keeping an eye on pests in cotton fields. In a recent extension newsletter, they explained a new pest that has made its way to Mississippi.

“The two-spotted cotton leafhopper was found infesting cotton in Raymond (on September 8) and has been positively ID’d by entomologists with the Mississippi Entomological Museum. There is a lot that we do not know about this pest, so most of this information is coming from neighboring states. In high numbers, this pest can cause severe hopper burn to cotton leaves, which displays as yellowing, reddening, and browning of the leaves, similar to K deficiency. If severe enough, cotton can prematurely drop leaves, ultimately negatively impacting yield,” the newsletter said.

Farmers Talking Harvest

Adron Belk at Triple Run Farms in Sunflower County didn’t have to replant anything due to the wet spring. Belk has a 50/50 rotation with corn and soybeans and adds in some wheat, milo and sunflowers for production.

“It’s a pretty early crop,” says Belk. “We’re pretty blessed and we wish the prices would go up. Everything that we could control we did pretty good on this year.” 

Victoria Darden farms in the south Delta in Onward has had to deal with rain and flooding this growing season.

“I got everything planted by April 30 and it was great until we had some backwater come up,” says Darden. “I really needed to replant but it didn’t dry out and give me the opportunity until it was way late. I was going to have some June and July beans but the weather did not cooperate so I took a loss on that and did not replant some of that backwater area that was about 200 acres.”

In Coahoma County, Joseph Melton had a good start, but he’s in the same conundrum as farmers across the United States when it comes to harvest and cashing out.

“I had an excellent planting experience this year,” says Melton. “I purchased a high-speed planter and I had my entire crop, including my sunflowers, planted in April. All my corn was planted by the end of March. I had three, four hundred acres of beans at the end of March. We just finished up cutting them and they turned out well. The irrigated turned out really well. The dry land, not so much. We had adequate rainfall up until the middle of July and then when it dried up, it dried up to nothing. And we hadn’t really had any hiccups at harvest. We had a rain or two, but the ground had been so dry for so long it soaked it right on up. We’re not cutting in the mud or anything like that. But the problem is poor prices and outrageous input costs. There’s not going to be any profit margin in there. It’s just not there. Everybody’s waiting to see how much they lose. It’s horrible.”

Chris Lively had rice and soybeans on his Coahoma County acreage. 

“The rice yield is good, but there’s absolutely zero market for it. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out,” says Lively. The soybeans I cut early on did really good. They were planted in March. I didn’t have to replant any soybeans but I did have some replant about 300 acres of rice.”

Scott Flowers has cotton and corn in his north Delta acreage rotation. 

“We had a good start on our corn because we started planting in late March in our area,” says Flowers. “We received some rains probably maybe the first of April it started, and then we got a break and got a good bit of corn planted mid-April, and we ended up planting more corn just because the price of corn was better than cotton.”

In regard to yield, “For us personally, I would say it’s an average corn crop,” he says. “We received a whole lot of rain once the corn was planted, and I think that helped us. We didn’t have to irrigate as much. But it was challenging to get it sprayed and fertilized because it just kept raining. Really, we started planting some cotton in late April and we probably planted around 1,500 acres and about 350 acres we had to replant. It started raining in May and we only had a few days we could get in the field during the whole month. Half of our cotton was planted on the 1st of June, which is late. We contemplated whether we should even plant anything. Some people did preventive planting and just took what insurance money they could get, which was not a profitable thing to do. But we had five to seven percent of our acreage that we didn’t plant anything on. It was just too wet for too long.”

Planting so late, Flowers is concerned about the yield those cotton acres will produce. 

“We’ve had very little June cotton,” he says. “I think, based on my experience and conversations with others, there’s a chance it could be good. It just depends on what kind of fall we have. If we get an early freeze, it would be bad. But this warm, dry weather right now is helping. We still have a chance to make a decent crop, but on the other hand, it also could also be unfavorable. I’ve seen late cotton that had a bunch of bowls on it, and then they just didn’t really open up.”

Flowers says he was able to get some soybeans in the ground. 

“We’ve got quite a bit of beans that were planted the first of June, and they can look pretty good, but that’s really not an optimal planting date,” he says. “And then you put on top of that just the economics of everything right now. It’s not ideal because you need to make a really high yield during these tough times, and I don’t know if it’ll happen or not. The corn was good for us comparatively. I wish we would have just kept planting corn.”

Taylor Watson, a farmer in Dundee, took a chance on corn this growing season.

“It’s the first year I’ve ever grown corn and it was average,” he says. “It wasn’t great, but some of it was pretty good. Some of it was in some buckshot land, so it did pretty good across the board. With soybeans, it’s really up and down. I’ve had some beans that look like they’re going to cut good, but they cut pretty bad. And some beans that don’t look good, they’re cut up. So, it’s been up and down. The beans are good in one spot in the field and bad in another. It’s kind of all over the place.”

Regarding booking his crop, Watson explains “Luckily, I sold a lot of stuff early this year. It’s really the first year I’ve ever done it. I sold heavy, heavy early, and it paid off. The only thing I haven’t sold is rice. I tried to sell rice back in February and March. There was no buyers to buy it. Right now, I’m just sitting on it in the grain bins with no price set for it. The rice market’s been in pretty bad shape.”

Mississippi State Extension Regional Coordinator Alex Deason has kept a close eye on Sunflower County and surrounding area crops. 

 “We have had a fairly uneventful harvest for the most part,” says Deaon. “Blessed with some great fall weather and spring planting windows that has allowed for harvest to basically roll right through with little down time. The corn crop has seen exceptional yields and the soybeans have seen average to slightly below average yields. Soybeans were the largest planted crop in the county with almost 220,000 acres. Corn saw a large increase in acreage as it almost reached 60,000 acres, the most since 2019.”

 The wet spring weather was felt more north of Sunflower County, according to Deason.

 “The weather did not inhibit planting or have as much replanting as the north delta or even the neighbors in Humphreys county, but we did see some acreage that was planned for corn or rice shift back to soybeans,” he says. “Which means soybeans were intended to be even lower and corn and rice acreage were anticipated to go higher. The biggest driving force this spring and through the fall for next spring has been the market. With today’s equipment we can cover a lot of ground in ten days. If we get two planting windows of five days each, we can almost plant the crop. We did see a slight decrease in acreage planted due to prevented planting or market forces.”