Northeast Mississippi Farmers Are Losing Precious Land
Erosion is an enemy for every farmer and landowner. In the McIvor Creek area of Panola County, a tributary of the Tallahatchie River, farmers have long been fighting a losing battle maintaining their acreage.
Local authorities have acknowledged the problem and brought it to the attention of Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Joe Azar, Panola Partnership’s Director of Economic Development, has been working to highlight the concerns and aid in finding solutions and funding to address it.
“We’ve had some preliminary engineering done on the river which our office paid for,” says Azar “And what’s been done is identify the problematic areas using Google Earth, and looking over time, they’ve identified all the bad turns in the river that are getting eroded. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has to go in and do some technical dredging where they take the steepness out from underneath the water and smooth it out then they riprap.”
Riprap uses large, angular rocks to armor slopes and shorelines against water erosion by dissipating wave energy and slowing water flow, preventing soil from washing away, and is ideal for protecting banks, culverts, and drainage ditches, often installed over geotextile fabric for maximum stability, though it needs periodic inspection for displaced stones and vegetation growth.
“Our office is waiting on a professional cost estimate that we can start going after the dollars because I don’t see this being any less than a $100 million project,” says Azar.
According to Azar the erosion or attrition problem goes all the way from Sardis Dam through Panola County into Tallahatchie County.
“We need federal dollars,” he says. “And this is a big problem. Farmers are losing their land, hunters are losing their land, landowners, period, are losing their land.”
Civil Engineer Blake Mendrop has been aware of the problem and the former Corps of Engineers employee now runs his own engineering firm working on problems like this all over the state.
“McIvor Drainage Canal is a tributary of the Tallahatchie River located in Panola County, Mississippi,” says Mendrop. “The Tallahatchie River and its tributaries have experienced long-term system responses to bed and bank adjustments over many years. As land use changes, channels are straightened, and flows are regulated over time, the system can become unstable and will continue to adjust in an effort to return to equilibrium. During this adjustment, bankline loss can occur, channels may degrade (incise) in upstream portions of the watershed, and sediment may deposit in downstream reaches.
He notes that the occurrence is common in North Mississippi.
“What appears to be occurring along the McIvor Drainage Canal is consistent with responses observed in many North Mississippi streams, where significant degradation and bank erosion have been documented,” says Mendrop. “In several watersheds, substantial funding and assistance from NRCS and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have been used to help address these issues; however, McIvor Canal does not appear to have received the same level of attention or resources. Similar to other affected channels, rapid bankline migration and notable channel degradation are evident, including indications at bridges where piling exposure suggests bed lowering throughout the watershed. As with other watersheds supported by the Corps and NRCS, a comprehensive evaluation should be completed to identify, prioritize, and target the most critical areas for addressing the watershed’s stability and erosion problems.”
Third-generation farmer, John Thomas, has been thousands of acres, and his family has been fighting the attrition problem for decades. With commodity prices bottoming out, he’s transitioned most of his farming operation to renting out his land, but still keeps 2,300 acres. But even with so many acres, he’s been losing that profitable dirt for decades.
“We’ve got real sandy soil up here that we grow cotton on,” says Thomas. “All of it’s cotton land, but from where the spillway starts up there, the lower lake, Sardis Lake, the Tallahatchie River, from the Highway 6 bridge, it’s just one curve after the next, and every curve, you’re losing land every year. I’ve probably lost 100 acres of farmland over the last twenty-five years.”
And with farmland selling anywhere from $3,000 to upwards of $7,500 an acre, that’s a big loss being washed away. Thomas has been fighting the good fight by dumping broken-up concrete into the bad spots.
“Every time I see somebody going to tear a building down or something that has a concrete slab, I’ll haul the concrete off for them for free as long as I can get the concrete,” says Thomas. “There’s no telling how many loads I’ve put down there in one spot on the river in a big curve on my farm. I probably put 400 to 500 loads of concrete in one curve down there. And it’s really helped it. It stopped the dam washing on it.”
Thomas actually has farmland that is now a sandbar in the river. Land he can’t recover. Land he can never farm again.
Robert Massey, Sr. is another farmer who has been fighting the attrition war. Massey has been farming since 1976 on a family farm that has been in the family for over a century. With land in Tate, Panola and Calhoun County, Massey has worked as a dairy, cotton and corn farmer since his youth.
“We’ve managed it and now we have higher precision tech to help,” says Massey. “There’s more knowledge about how to control it now. Riffraff has come into play real big. The NRCS has helped us some with the EQUIP program, but a farmer is just naturally a conservator of the land. Really good farmers make good choices with erosion. Trees are an option, but not a good one, but it’s better than watching your land wash away. Pasture and cattle are managerial practices. I try not to farm erodible land but when I do we terrace it.”
John Hobson, Supervisory District Conservationist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Panola County Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office, has been working with landowners on the erosion problem throughout his territory using the EQIP.
“That’s the Environmental Quality Incentives Program,” says Hobson. “Through the program, we try to take land that has resource concerns like this soil erosion that they have and install practices to mitigate those problems. Depending on what their problems are, there’s a practice called stream bank and shoreline protection that could be installed if it’s all inside the banks. If they have head cuts, we can do grade control structures. In our terminology, it’s a grade stabilization structure. Generally, when we’re talking to farmers, we call them pipes. We offer this on virtually every privately owned farmland unit in the country. And some publicly owned land. As long as it’s farmed and they’ve got farm serial numbers and the participant wants to get all their eligibility up to date, they can apply for EQIP. It’s not automatic, but there’s a ranking system.”
The Panola County office had 109 applications last year and twenty-three contracts were written for work. There are already more than 100 applications for work in 2026.
“We worked our tails off last year, had a lot of money to spend, but it still only touched a small percentage of our applicants,” he says.
Regarding the McIvor Creek situation, Hobson knows Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith is aware of the need and work is probably being done behind the scenes to get ready, but no timeline is in place.
“The Corps of Engineers calls us and gets try helps we help them with landowner information helping, them to get in touch with different landowners,” says Hobson. “I’m all about helping. If we could spend a billion dollars in Panola County, I’d love it. Especially on infrastructure. Our county allocation is the largest in northeast Mississippi, Panola County, the farthest west in the region, but it’s an area one. And we get the largest amount of money in area one, and it’s not even close. And it’s still in the lower six digits. So, it would just take, it would probably take about eight digits to make a good dent in McKeever. Chances are it may take ten to fifteen years to get something going with money on the ground ready to spend.”