BY JULIE SPEED
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal

  Agriculture, the state's top industry - at $4.7 billion, it has a $20 billion impact - employs approximately one third of Mississippi's labor force either directly or indirectly on the state's 42,000 farms on 11.7 million acres.
  "About 33,600 people are employed directly in agricultural jobs in the state," said Kathy Jones of the Mississippi Employment Security Commission.
  The most dramatic changes have been in farm numbers and concentration of production, said John E. Lee, Jr., professor and head of agricultural economics at Mississippi State University.
  "In 1959, Mississippi had 138,142 farms, (declining) to 42,125 in 1997," he said. "But 75% of the value of all farm production came from only 2,159 farms. Over half the operators of the 42,125 farms do not identify their occupation as farming. Most of the places defined by the census as farms are hobby farms, rural residences and small 'lifestyle' farms, where the principle family income comes from non-farm success."
  Nationally, Mississippi is the No. 1 producer and processor of catfish, No. 4 producer of sweet potatoes and poultry and No. 5 producer of rice, said Inza Calloway of the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce.
  "Even so, we are seeing a slow but continuing downward trend in people directly employed in agriculture," said Florine Miller of MESC in Clarksdale.
  Five Delta counties - Bolivar, Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Tunica and Washington - account for most of Mississippi's 268,000 harvested rice acres.
  "Mississippi's traditional field crops (are) grown on fewer than 1,000 farms," Lee said. "In 1972, traditional row crops accounted for half of the value of farm and forest production in Mississippi. Today, field crops account for only one-fourth. Sales of catfish now exceed all row crops except cotton."
  In 1998, the average yield of cotton per acre was 740 pounds, he said.
  "In 1959, 77,390 farms in Mississippi grew cotton, versus only 1,701 in 1997," Lee said. "But we produced more cotton in 1997 than in 1959."
  Two years ago, two million acres of soybeans were harvested, yielding 24 bushels per acre. The story is similar for corn and dairy cattle, Lee said.
"We are continually monitoring the changing food and agricultural landscape and trying to respond in ways that make us useful to all the publics we serve," said Lee.

1. Poultry/eggs - $1.46 billion
2. Forestry - $1.31 billion
3. Cotton - $441.3 million
4. Catfish - $307 million
5. Soybeans - $290.4 million
6. Meat Animals - $211 million
7. Rice - $136 million
8. Dairy - $105 million
9. Horticulture - $93.6 million
10. Corn - $88.2 million