This paper examines the racially segregationist practices and the integrationist, inclusionist formation of African American leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard during his tenure as a surgeon and entrepreneur in the all-black Mississippi Delta community of Mound Bayou, 1942-1956. The paper analytically investigates the careful racial negotiations that were required of Howard as he advanced a separatist but egalitarian economic and social plan for Delta blacks. This separatist plan, it is argued, is grounded in the racial pragmatism of the Seventh-day Adventist church which provided a bibliocentric, Tuskegee-inspired education to Howard from youth through medical school and beyond. Howard’s adherence to Adventist racial codes provided him with unique tools to establish financial strength and social cachet whereby he could in time shift to a more inclusionist, desegregationist focus. Howard’s separatist racial pragmatism is demonstrated in his creation of an economic power base in the 1940s. The 1950s shift to an inclusive position appears principally in three developments in Howard’s Mound Bayou career: the founding of the Regional Council for Negro Leadership, his activism after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and his involvement in the trial of Emmett Till’s killers. Evidence is given from a number of primary sources, including both regional and national newspapers and the collected papers of Mississippi House Speaker Walter Sillers. The thesis argues that Howard’s pragmatism was both informed by Adventist racial pragmatism and provided the base whereby he could challenge Jim Crow directly; the pattern is accepting and enhancing racial segregation for the purpose of developing the means to work toward a racially inclusive, integrationist ideal. This pattern appears in Adventist evangelist practice, and it appears, with striking resemblance, in Howard’s work in Mound Bayou.

The eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallapovo silvestris) was nearly extirpated from the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) from overharvesting and habitat loss in the early 1900s. Habitat restoration with hardwood regeneration has likely improved habitat suitability for turkeys in the MAV. I studied establishment and movement of translocated turkeys to assess feasibility of turkey restoration in the MAV. Turkeys were translocated to 2 study sites in the MAV during winters of 2009 and 2010. I monitored movement, survival, and resource selection of translocated turkeys using radio telemetry (February 2009–April 2011). Movement increased with increasing resource dispersion. Mortalities did not differ among 4 causes. Biweekly survival of translocated turkeys was related inversely to spring precipitation, but related positively to precipitation during other seasons. Mature and regenerating hardwood forests served as nesting and brooding habitat; therefore, increasing hardwood forests will likely improve success of future turkey restoration in the MAV.

Surface sealing and hardpans in loam soils are problematic in the Mid-South U.S. because of intense tillage. Two experiments quantified the effects of soil management practices on infiltration and maize yield in loam soils. The first study measured the impacts of in-row subsoiling frequency × furrow irrigation frequency. In-row subsoiling significantly improved the infiltration of irrigation but not the infiltration of precipitation. In-row subsoiling with low irrigation frequency is optimal to achieve profitable maize yields while encouraging groundwater conservation. In the second study, six soil management treatments were imposed. For single-ring infiltrometer tests, infiltration rates were different between the two measurement dates but not between measured treatments. In 2022, neutron attenuation data indicated no differences in soil water content between measured treatments. Based on both studies, in-row subsoiling was proven to be an economically viable option in comparison to other Mississippi Delta on-farm conservation practices in the short term.

Fish community data were used to develop an index of biotic integrity (IBI) to quantify habitat degradation in oxbow lakes of the Delta region of the Yazoo River Basin. Daytime boat electrofishing was used to sample the fish assemblage of 30 oxbow lakes during 2006-2007. We evaluated 70 candidate metrics based on their responses to measures of anthropogenic disturbance. Six metrics were retained for inclusion in the IBI: species richness, Shannon’s diversity (H’), average tolerance, and catch rates of buffalo, orangespotted sunfish, and litho-psammophilic spawners. The six IBI metrics showed strong multivariate relationships with measures of habitat degradation in a canonical correlation analysis. Spearman’s rank correlation and scatterplot analysis showed that IBI scores changed in a predictable pattern along gradients of habitat degradation. Three additional lakes were sampled in 2008 and were used to successfully validate the IBI. Biotic integrity was found to be impaired in most oxbow lakes of the Mississippi Delta.

The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Basin (LMAB) faces significant environmental challenges due to phosphorus (P) runoff from agricultural lands, contributing to eutrophication and aquatic ecosystem degradation. Excess nutrient runoff, particularly P, threatens water quality and contributes to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. The current Mississippi Phosphorus Index (P-Index), a tool for assessing P loss vulnerability from agricultural fields, has shown limitations in its applicability across the diverse conditions of the Mississippi Delta, a sub-region of the LMAB. This research presents a comprehensive revision of the P-Index by employing a suite of analytical techniques and diverse data sources, including geospatial analysis, rainfall simulations, and extensive data from soil tests, agricultural censuses, and expert evaluations. The aim was to enhance the model's sensitivity and accuracy in predicting P loss vulnerability, thereby enabling more precise nutrient management recommendations tailored to the Mississippi Delta's unique agricultural and environmental conditions. The study identified a critical lack of variability in the P-Index's recommendations for different agricultural scenarios within the region, highlighting its inadequacy in accurately reflecting the specific vulnerabilities to soil P loss. Through a detailed sensitivity analysis and recalibration of the model, incorporating updated parameters and data sources, significant improvements were achieved. The revised P-Index now better distinguishes between various agricultural practices set in the environmental conditions of the MS Delta, offering differentiated recommendations that align closely with the region's real-world complexities. Furthermore, the research underscores the necessity for ongoing investigations into the equivalencies between different soil test P methods (Lancaster and Mehlich-III) and the impact of P levels in irrigation water on nutrient cycling and loss. The recalibrated P-Index represents a significant step forward in regional nutrient management strategies, promising enhanced environmental protection and agricultural sustainability through more informed and targeted recommendations. This work emphasizes the critical need for adapting nutrient management tools like the P-Index to regional conditions, ensuring they accurately address the environmental challenges and agricultural practices specific to areas like the Mississippi Delta. Keywords: Nutrient management, Phosphorus Index, Mississippi Delta, Agricultural runoff, Soil test phosphorus, Environmental sustainability, Sensitivity analysis, Trend analysis.

A concerning public health issue in America is about food deserts urban and rural communities that lack grocery retailers that offer affordable, nutritious, and diverse foods. Empirical evidence has shown significant associations between neighborhood disadvantage/disorder risk factors of high poverty and high percentages of ethnic minority residents with presence/ absence of healthy food retailers in food deserts. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study, framed by the disparities in food safety conceptual model, was to examine if county-level poverty, number of African American residents, number of elderly (i.e., age 65 or older) residents, vehicle ownership, and crime rates were significantly associated with presence/absence of healthy food retail environments in a stratified random sample of 160 Mississippi Delta Region counties. Variables were measured using SPSS 25.0 data set from federal sources. Data were analyzed using binary logistic regression. Findings indicated that the percentage of households below poverty level was significantly associated with absence of healthy food retailers, (Wald X2 = 7.62, p = .006). Logistic regression findings further showed that the county percentage of households with at least one vehicle was significantly associated with the presence of healthy food retailers, (Wald X2= 8.75, p = .003). As a result of this study, residents of the Mississippi Delta Region (MDR) may begin to petition their local, county, and state governments to enhance access to healthy foods, and in turn, such government institutions may develop programs and initiatives that help to make healthy foods affordable.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

Ninety-eight percent of water taken from the Mississippi River Shallow Alluvial Aquifer, hereafter referred to as “the aquifer” or “MRVA,” is used by the agricultural industry for irrigation. Mississippi Delta agriculture is increasingly using more water from the MRVA and the aquifer has been losing about 300,000 acreeet per year. This research expands on previous work in which a model was developed that simulates the effects of climatic variability, crop acreage changes, and specific irrigation methods on consequent variations in the water volume of the MRVA. This study corrects an identified problem by replacing total growing season precipitation with an irrigation demand driver based on evaporation and crop coefficients and changing the time scale from the entire growing season to a daily resolution. The calculated irrigation demand, as a climatological driver for the model, captures effective precipitation more precisely than the initial growing season precipitation driver. Predictive equations resulting from regression analyses of measured versus calculated irrigation water use showed R2 and correlations of 0.33 and 0.57, 0.77 and 0.88, 0.71 and 0.84, and 0.68 and 0.82 for cotton, corn, soybeans and rice, respectively. Ninetyive percent of the predicted values fall within a range of + or - about 23,000 acreeet, an error of about 10-percent. The study also adds an additional conservation strategy through the use of surface water from onarm reservoirs in lieu of groundwater. Analyses show that climate could provide the entire water need of the plants in 70-percent of the years for corn, 65-percent of the years for soybeans and cotton, and even 5-percent of the years for rice. Storing precipitation in onarm structures is an effective way to reduce reliance of Delta producers on groundwater. If producers adopted, at a minimum, the 97.5:2.5 ratio suggested management practice, this minimal management strategy could potentially conserve 48-percent, 35-percent and 42-percent of groundwater for cotton, corn and soybeans, respectively. Even in extreme drought years such as 2007, cotton, corn and soybeans produced under the 97.5:2.5 management strategy could conserve 32-percent, 46-percent and 38-percent of groundwater, respectively.

Reducing groundwater withdrawals from the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer is imperative to sustain future irrigated cropping systems in the mid-southern USA. This research was conducted to determine the impacts of cover crops and irrigation sensor thresholds on corn (Zea mays L.) and soybean (Glycine max L.) production, water productivity, irrigation water use efficiency, and soil physical properties in the Mississippi Delta. The cover crop treatments included cereal rye (Secale cereale L.), hairy vetch (Vicia villosa R.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)-radish (Raphanus sativus L.)-turnip (Brassica rapa L.) mix, and no cover crop. The irrigation thresholds included -40 kPa, -90 kPa, and no irrigation. In 2020, cover crops and irrigation thresholds showed minimal impacts on most of the measured parameters but showed improvements as the study progressed. After two years, it was determined that long-term evaluations are needed to make a recommendation to producers in the mid-southern USA.

This is a creative thesis in the form of a screenplay titled “Andalusia” in which a woman, Katherine, searches for meaning in her life. After suffering through a childhood wrought with tragedy, disappointment, and chaos, Katherine strives to create a healthy reality in which she can thrive. After failing miserably at this once, she takes a different path and finds herself hidden away in her dead father’s house writing about the Mississippi Delta town of Andalusia.