Mississippi Land for Sale

The Deep South is never deeper than it is in Mississippi, the cradle of America’s music, steeped in beauty and history. Mississippi has a reputation as the nation’s poorest and most rural state, yet a 2009 report by the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked Mississippi’s economic outlook higher than that of California, New York and Texas. Much of this is due to the fact that Mississippi Delta, one of America’s richest and most fertile farmlands, has the lowest irrigation cost of any agricultural land within the United States. Mississippi Land for Sale will be providing the twenty-first century with its food, fiber and energy.

Mississippi’s flat, placid lowlands are some of the most fertile soil on the planet. The floodwaters of the state’s namesake river regularly deposited silt in the alluvial plains of the Delta region. Coastal wetlands, a system of bays, bogs, bayous, estuaries, marshes and swamps, spread in a wide band from the Texas to Louisiana border. The longest river in the state is the Pearl which defines the Magnolia State’s boundary with Louisiana, and saw considerable damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The most populous city in Mississippi and its state capital is Jackson, which has never regained its strategic importance as a manufacturing center at the time of the Civil War. Today Jackson is a sleepy metropolis on the banks of Town Creek, best known as the site of civil rights activism during the 1960s when more than 300 Freedom Riders were arrested there while demonstrating against segregation on public transportation. Jackson is also famous as the birthplace of writers Eudora Welty and Richard Wright. On the coast, Gulfport and its neighbor Biloxi, together the Magnolia State’s second largest metropolitan area, suffered almost as much damage from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina as New Orleans itself and are slowly putting themselves back together. Biloxi is famous for its offshore casinos featuring 24 hour gambling and concert entertainment. Other famous Mississippi population centers are Natchez, founded by French colonists in 1716, and filled with beautiful antebellum homes and plantation mansions and Oxford, site of The University of Mississippi –”Ole Miss;” home Nobel Laureate William Faulkner. Rock and Roll legend Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, while the Vicksburg National Military Park in Vicksburg commemorates that town’s three-month siege during the Civil War.

Mississippi’s weather is tropical and moist. Winters are short and mild, summers are long and hot and the planting season comes early. The Magnolia State is at risk from both hurricanes and tornadoes: two of the five deadliest twisters in U.S. history touched down in Mississippi, while Hurricane Katrina in 2005 killed 238 people across the state.

The 2008 recession didn’t affect Mississippi very much. How could it? Endemic poverty is not subject to cyclical rises and dips. Long before the national economy tanked, Mississippi’s unemployment rate was in the double digits and one in five Mississippians lived below the federal poverty line.

The good new is that recovery monies poured into the state can do more than correct a temporary imbalance. Mississippi pro-business taxation policies and regulatory stances have created a positive business climate that’s attracting major investment, like the Toyota plant being built in the northeastern part of the state. Economic forecasting firm Moody’s lists Mississippi as one of the states where signs of recovery are apparent.

But Mississippi’s most important resource is its agricultural industry. Many agricultural regions across the United States have essentially exhausted their irrigation water supplies: the ground water level has fallen to alarmingly low levels across California and the Midwest. Rainfall and aquifers are plentiful throughout Mississippi. Ample irrigation combined with a prolonged growing season allows enables cash crops like rice, cotton, soybeans, and corn to thrive. Mississippi Land for Sale is an investment in America’s 21st Century breadbasket.