Agriculture in Mississippi

From colonization until the American Civil War agriculture in Mississippi was dominated by a plantation based cotton production system which relied on enslaved labor.

[2] Before the Civil War, Mississippi was the fifth-wealthiest state in the nation, its wealth generated by the labor of slaves in cotton plantations along the rivers.

[3] Largely due to the domination of the plantation economy, focused on the production of agricultural cotton, the state's elite was reluctant to invest in infrastructure such as roads and railroads.

The planter aristocracy, the elite of antebellum Mississippi, kept the tax structure low for their own benefit, making only private improvements.

The low prices of cotton into the 1890s meant that more than a generation of African Americans lost the result of their labor when they had to sell their farms to pay off accumulated debts.

[4] After the Civil War, the state refused for years to build human capital by fully educating all its citizens.

[6] The negative effects of overdevelopment and climate change on agriculture in California have made large scale commercial farming in the Mississippi Delta more attractive.