Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot

Jack Westerfield stood ankle deep atop 30 feet of unhusked rice, his gray T-shirt and jeans dusty with starchy powder. He sounded distressed.

“What am I supposed to do with 2.2 million pounds of rice?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the noisy industrial fans drying the rice on his farm in Merigold, Miss. “I’m serious. What am I supposed to do?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Mr. Westerfield had even considered whether he should dump the grains onto a field to rot.

Across the country, farmers are struggling. Prices for nearly every major crop are below what it costs to grow them. Much attention has been paid to Midwestern soybean growers, whose crop was at the heart of the trade war between the United States and China. But farmers in Mississippi are perhaps worse off than farmers in the rest of the country. Rice is one of their biggest crops, and almost no one is buying.