CLEVELAND – At face value, it’s still a day of Matlock meets Betty Crocker at a lawn party fish fry. Southern traditions – real and imagined, it seems – still hangs in the air on the campus of Delta State University as thick as the humidity.
The men still sport the old Andy Griffith character’s obligatory seersucker and linen suits and the women still look cool and fetching in the latest in made-from-cotton fashions. Susan Flowers of Clarksdale (who shares the Neshoba County Fair addiction with me) took home the “Good Middling Award” – named after the best grade of cotton – in recognition of her efforts to promote her community and region.
But that’s really where the Old South trappings of Delta Council ends and where the reality of the modern organization begins.
The 81st annual meeting of the Delta Council was in reality a study in Mississippi’s modern contrasts. Delta Council is an area economic development organization representing the eighteen Delta and part-Delta counties of Northwest Mississippi. Supported by dues paying members and by the counties it serves, Delta Council has since 1935 remained one of Mississippi’s most influential organizations.
Since inception in 1935, the group’s agenda was focused and practical: “The promotion of agriculture, including agricultural research and legislation relating to agricultural programs of special significance to area farmers; flood control and drainage which are imperative to the area’s welfare; and the promotion and development of transportation facilities and services with special attention to the development of a modern highway system throughout the entire Delta.”
In terms of governance, scope of service, and diversity and inclusion, today’s Delta Council isn’t an organization out of step with the rest of the state or the rest of the world.
The keynote speaker at Delta Council this year was U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 after serving 14 years in the U.S. House, Moran serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee and is a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Additionally, he serves as chairman of the Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee.
Moran told the Delta Council audience that a key emerging market for American agricultural products is Cuba – and that perhaps no segment of the agricultural economy could benefit more or faster than rice producers.
For several years, Moran has been an advocate of opening Cuban markets to American farmers: “Developing agricultural trade relations with Cuba will allow the Cuban people to put more pressure on the Cuban government to change its behavior. Cuba is not a huge market, but with today’s low commodity prices in agriculture, we need every market we can get,” he said.
In his address at Delta Council, Moran touted a central theme popular with Mississippi Delta farmers – the notion that future competitive success depend in great measure on the continued growth and development of modern technology in traditional farming pursuits and the more difficult proposition of opening new markets for American farm products.
“Here in the Mississippi Delta and beyond, there is no more important part of the future of our community — our world — than the prosperity of agriculture,” Moran said. “So agricultural policy and the opportunity to excel and better the regulation of agriculture is a goal.”
 “We can’t afford to be divided as farmers and ranchers,” Moran said. “There are so few of us. We are working hard to continue to grow separately, but also we want to work even harder to continue to grow together.”
Moran’s message made sense – that rural Americans like those in Kansas and Mississippi have a tremendous vested interest in foreign relations and emerging agricultural markets and that farmers and producers must stay politically engaged if those rural interests are to remain relevant to the nation’s political leadership.
(Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him sidsalter@sidsalter.com)