The levee system that holds the Mississippi River in check began not as a wall, but in a moment of hubris that man can tame nature. In the late 1800s, the first levees rose like thin hope out of the floodplain of mud. They were built by hand, by convict laborers and freedmen, by people with no choice but to believe that a pile of dirt could hold back the world’s most unpredictable river.
They held. Sometimes.
Other times, the river came anyway. And when it did, like the great flood of 1927, it reminded everyone in its path who was really in charge.
That same uneasy truth still defines the life of a Delta farmer.
In this place, the battle between man and nature never ends. Every spring, we sit on edge and watch the river gauges. We feel the sky shift. We see the wind twist in ways we’ve learned not to ignore. The soil that feeds us can just as easily swallow us.
The Delta loves us but she does not care how much debt you carry or how hard you worked to put a crop in the ground. It rains when it wants. It bakes when it wants. The price of soybeans crash the same week your bins fill up. The irrigation pump fails the day after your last spare funds went into the ground. The storms roll over the flat horizon like something out of a gothic novel. Gothic, that is what 2025 feels like. We are in a novel and we don’t yet have the ending.
Yet we stay.
We stay because resilience is coded into the DNA of this place. It has to be. The same levees that first fought the river still stretch along the banks, patched and raised, beaten down and built back up again. They are imperfect, but they endure. Just like the people.
You can’t understand the Delta without understanding the people who farm it. Men and women who rise at 5 a.m. not because they want to, but because the work demands it. Who pray not for prosperity, but for just enough. Who bury friends and neighbors too soon but wake up the next day and climb back onto the tractor.
There is a certain tragic poetry in farming here. Every crop a gamble. Every season a sermon about humility. No one controls the outcome. You just do your part, trust your gut, and believe in the land even when it gives you every reason not to.
The levee still stands. The farmers, we still plant. Both know that the fight is never over, but neither would dream of walking away.
Because this is the Delta. We bend, but we don’t break. Even when we know the next storm is surely to come.
Stafford Shurden is a retired judge, farmer, restauranteur, and content creater in Drew.