AGRICULTURAL POTENTIALITIES 

 OF MISSISSIPPI 



By W. J. McGEE, LL.D. 



(Synopsis of addresses delivered in special joint session of the 

 State Senate and House February 5 and 8, 1910). 



Mississippi is essentially an agricultural State ; with the pos- 

 sible exception of the neighboring commonwealth, -Louisiana, 

 it is the most completely agricultural State in the Union, and its 

 manifest destiny is to fill the mouths of the rapidly growing popu- 

 lation of less favored parts of the country. Of its thirty million 

 acres, there is scarcely one not susceptible to cultivation and high 

 productivity though a few require drainage. "No other states 

 save possibly Louisiana and Iowa are so fully arable; and in 

 climate it is superior even to these. Even beyond the unsur- 

 passed fitness of its fair and fertile lands for the production of 

 food is another value seldom reckoned until recently its natural 

 water supply. The average Rainfall of the United States is but 

 30 inches- hardly half that required for full productivity of the 

 soil. The rainfall of Mississippi averages almost exactly 55 

 inches, or nearly enough for full productivity,, while this supply 

 is supplemented along its borders by^/drainage from half the rest 

 of the country. Thus far there are those who think Mississippi's 

 water supply excessive ; but they have not learned the hard lesson 

 of agriculture in the arid region. In the arid districts of this 

 country, and of the world, this lesson has been conned long and 

 mastered fully. Under intensive agriculture as in its best de- 

 velopments in Arizona and New Mexico, California and Nevada 

 it has been found that five acres are enough for a family that 

 on five acres a family of five may live far more luxuriously and 



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