'Make do with less': Mississippi farmers plow ahead despite tariff uncertainty

State's Black farmers have long faced disadvantages, including many brought on by the government

On a recent hot, windy late-summer day, Robert Miller II was out shopping for tractor parts. His wife, Christi Bland Miller, was riding a tractor, cutting rice in their fields.

“It’s a whole ordeal,” Christi said of rice farming.

“With soybeans, it takes longer to fill an 18-wheeler so you have a little time to breathe,” she said. “With rice, you need twice as many trucks, twice as many grain carts and you’re loading into bins, so you have to have employees at the grain bins loading it into the bins to dry. It’s really labor intensive, but it yields more than soybeans. You get more of a return on your investment.”

The Millers’ operation in Sledge, in Quitman County, is a bit more than 2,000 acres. They’re fourth-generation farmers, with Christi’s family having cultivated this land for nearly 100 years. Between Arkansas, the largest rice-growing state in the United States, and Mississippi, which ranks No. 6, the Delta region grows a significant portion of the nation’s rice. The crop is planted in the spring, grows in irrigated (i.e. flooded) fields and is harvested about 150 days later.

Even with a bigger return on investment in rice than other crops, the Millers—along with farmers across Mississippi and the U.S.— don’t yet know how much income they’ll generate from this year’s crops, including soybeans, but one thing is certain:

“It’s pretty bleak for both,” Christi said.

Current conditions are difficult for all the state’s farmers, and many Black growers have historically faced an array of unique, additional challenges that have decimated African American farms and land ownership. Now, tariffs and resulting market losses are hitting everyone hard — which, for farmers like the Millers, has both tested and increased their resolve to preserving Black farm life for generations to come.

With roughly 5 percent of the U.S. soybean crop harvested this year, China, historically the largest importer of U.S. soybeans, still hasn’t ordered any. The Trump Administration’s trade war with China, which has escalated in the 10 months since Donald Trump returned to the White House for the second time, has significantly disrupted the soybean market. Shortly after taking office, Trump ordered blanket tariffs on China, ostensibly for failing to stop fentanyl trafficking to America. By the spring, a series of back-and-forth retaliatory measures pushed tariffs soaring — to 145 percent on Chinese goods entering the U.S. and 125 percent on U.S. goods going to China.

In the meantime, China has looked elsewhere for soybeans, upping agreements with South American nations, including Brazil, the second most populous nation in the Western Hemisphere. Caleb Ragland, president of St. Louis-based American Soybean Association warned in an August letter to Trump that, “U.S. soybean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer,” adding that: “The further into the autumn we get without reaching an agreement with China on soybeans, the worse the impacts will be on U.S. soybean farmers."

Likewise, the price of rice has been falling all year. In the past 30 days, the price has dropped 7.35 percent from the previous period and plummeted more than 25 percent against the same period last year, according to data from Trending Economics. With lower prices, some rice farmers sat on their old rice crop, creating long lines at grain elevators—a reality that also forced the Millers to plant and, therefore harvest, this year’s rice crop a little later than normal.

“It’s heart-breaking to see what’s happening now,” one farm real estate agent recently observed. “It’s very surreal. Now, all crops are being produced by the world’s best farmers at a loss. It’s been bad for years, and 2026 is projected to be worse than this year.” The farm real-estate agent spoke to Delta Farm Press, a publication of Farm Progress Daily.

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat whose district includes the Delta, echoed the agent’s observation, telling The Mississippi Independent earlier this month that farmers are "terrified of losing their livelihoods."

“I hear from the corn growers. I hear from the beet people. I hear from the rice people. If they can’t sell to China, Canada or Mexico, they are in real trouble,” Thompson said. “These countries have other options, and we’re chasing them away."

H.R. 1, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump backed and signed in July, earmarks $66 billion in support for farm programs, the bulk of which — $59 billion — goes to Price Loss Coverage, Agriculture Risk Coverage, Dairy Margin Coverage and crop insurance, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Those provisions don't kick in until October 2026. Trump’s USDA is reportedly considering bridge payments to help farmers into next year. Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who touts the passage of Trump's budget bill at the top of her website, did not respond to a question about whether she supported or was in conversation with the administration about such bridge payments.

“I understand trying to have fair trading and fair markets,” Christi Miller said. “But some of those markets have been created over 20-30 years, especially with soybeans and the relationship with China. I would just hate for it to disappear in a mere, what, eight, nine months?”

Christi's family began farming in the Delta in 1928. At the turn of the 20th century, Mississippi was home to almost 21,000 African American farmers, second only to Virginia. That was around the time Black farmer ownership peaked in the state; in 1910, some 2 million acres of farmland were owned by Black families, according to a 2019 article in The Atlantic.

Black farm ownership declined precipitously starting around 1950 due to the convergence of several factors, including racism, discrimination in lending (including by the federal government) and economic changes that made smaller-scale farming more challenging.

By the mid-1960s, the percentage of African-American owned farms dipped below 6 percent. The federal U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report finding that the USDA discriminated against Black farmers when providing loans and conservation payments, and during the next three decades, those findings would be reinforced by other federal agencies, including the U.S. General Accounting Office and the USDA itself.

The landmark class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman, alleging pervasive discrimination in the USDA, was filed in 1997; a settlement reached two years later would pay Black farmers $1.03 billion. More than 22,000 Black farmers filed claims, with 15,645 receiving modest payments. A second settlement, known as the Pigford II settlement, was reached in 2010 for those farmers who had missed the original filing deadline. In all, $1.25 billion in total compensation was made available to Black farmers.

Despite the payouts, Black farmers have cited the persistence of a discriminatory culture at USDA. The Pigford settlement did not require changes to how the agency operates, and for decades the agency has denied Black farmers access to credit and loan programs, resulting in higher rates of delinquency and loan default, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included a program to forgive USDA loans held by “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” — groups that had faced generations of discrimination. White farmers filed lawsuits alleging reverse discrimination, and several federal courts issued injunctions that prevented the program from taking effect.

In 2022, Congress replaced the blocked program in the Inflation Reduction Act with an ostensibly race-neutral debt relief initiative for distressed borrowers. USDA programs designed to support Black farmers met further rollbacks this year as a result of Trump's assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

But by all accounts, farming could provide a path to increasing generational wealth for Black families. McKinsey & Company, a management-consulting firm, found in 2021 that although African American farms are smaller and earn less income on average than white farms, the median income of Black farm families is approximately a quarter higher compared with all African American households.

Robert Miller, who lived in Illinois and in Mississippi’s DeSoto and Lafayette counties before marrying Christi (and into her farming family), worries about keeping younger generations involved in farming, noting the USDA’s elimination of a $19.2 million scholarship program that covered the cost of tuition, fees, books and lodging at HBCUs, including Alcorn State University, the nation's first and oldest land-grant university.

“On our farm we do farm-to-table events so people can see what we do. When I met Christi, I’d never seen an African American female farmer; seeing her operate a tractor opened my eyes. We try to uplift other young women and show that, even though agriculture is male-dominated, there are Black women out here doing it,” Robert said.

Despite gloomy recent headlines and market uncertainty, the Millers are surprisingly buoyant.

“My dad started farming in the ’80s when interest rates were 18–19 percent and there was historical discrimination,” Christi said. “If he could withstand that, we can, too. Everything comes and goes; you won’t always have good years.”

Robert said the key is to remain optimistic. “If you don’t have hope, what do you have?” he asked. “As Black people in America, we’ve often had to make do with less. That resilience keeps you going."

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Image: Robert Miller and Christi Bland Miller on their Quitman County farm (courtesy Robert Miller II)