Farmers consider leaving staple crops to rot following unexpected crisis: 'What am I supposed to do with 2.2 million pounds of [this]?'
Noah Jampol
Sun, February 1, 2026 at 6:30 PM EST
3 min read
Farmers in the Mississippi Delta are dealing with a nightmarish 2025 with an unsolvable problem. They simply have too much of their rice crops with nowhere to sell them.
What's happening?
The New York Times reported on the confluence of factors leaving farmers in Mississippi unable to sell their rice, despite many betting heavily on the crop.
Prices reached $7 a bushel last spring, which led farmers like Jack Westerfield to commit additional land to the crop. That decision backfired quickly. Global rice prices have tumbled 30% to around $5 a bushel. India lowered restrictions on exports, raising supply. Meanwhile, Latin America, a key market, is choosing other countries' rice over American varieties.
That is leading farmers in the Delta to store unheard-of quantities of rice in grain bins.
"What am I supposed to do with 2.2 million pounds of rice?" Westerfield asked the Times rhetorically.
Westerfield is far from alone in this quandary for American farmers. This situation parallels challenges faced by soybean producers dealing with trade tensions, as they are compelled to offload surplus produce.
At a Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, attendees proposed the idea of a government-backed program where farmers would get compensated for simply getting rid of their surplus rice.
Why are the struggles of Mississippi Delta farmers important?
The financial prospects for farming remain bleak, and the appeal for newcomers to come in is waning.
"Who wants to come out here and work as hard as you have to work and climb this mountain of debt you might not see the top of until the end of your life?" Westerfield asked.
Meanwhile, established farmers are questioning the future, wondering how many more years in the red they can take. At the core of the problem is that American farmers, including those in the Delta, rarely grow food that gets sold on the U.S. market.
That means that they're at the mercy of demand overseas, which can be impacted by tariffs, rival production, and changing market preferences. In years where demand doesn't match supply, acres of farmland are wasted on crops that can't sell. That means all of the fuel, water, and labor go to waste.
What's being done about Mississippi farmers' struggles?
Farmers are getting a lifeline through a $12 billion bailout, with rice growers compensated on the higher end. Still, the $132-per-acre buyout for rice falls well short of the roughly $1,000-per-acre price to cultivate the unsold crops.
Story Continues
Another proposed idea is changing over crops to higher-priced ones that Americans eat like fresh fruit, vegetables, and nuts. The problem is that doing so will require a paradigm shift for American agriculture.
Everything from university research, federal government insurance, financing from banks, the supply chain, and a network of buyers would need to be reworked to support a transition.
That's too tall an ask, according to some farmers.
"We could grow strawberries or whatever, but there is nowhere to take it," farmer Wayne Dulaney told the Times.
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