Agriculture and forestry make a big impact on Mississippi’s economy, and Marion County holds a lot of influence at the state Capitol on those issues.
Speaker of the House Philip Gunn recently reappointed Rep. Bill Pigott, R-Tylertown, as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and Rep. Ken Morgan, R-Morgantown, as chairman of the House Forestry Committee.
Both legislators represent portions of Marion County.
The overall value of agriculture in Mississippi in 2019 was nearly $7.4 billion, according to the MSU Extension Service. Timber was Mississippi’s No. 2 agricultural commodity with an estimated production value of about $1.2 billion (chickens were first at about $2.8 billion).
“We’re just proud to be a part of it. I think that speaks well for this area,” Morgan said this week.
Pigott will again lead the 33-member ag committee after chairing it for the previous four years.
He said the major agriculture issue he expects to come up this session will be the legalization of growing hemp.
“It’s going to be tightly regulated. It will be another avenue for our farmers, another row crop, and it’s going to be very closely monitored,” Pigott said.
Hemp was widely grown in the United States throughout its early history but was banned by federal law in the mid-20th century because it’s a member of the cannabis family, which also includes marijuana. However, hemp contains negligible amounts of THC, the hallucinogenic chemical in marijuana that makes users high, so hemp has almost no risk of being abused as a drug.
The federal government removed restrictions on growing hemp in the 2018 farm bill, and now it’s up to states to decide whether to allow it.
Pigott said hemp grown in Mississippi would be required to have less than 0.3% THC and that some 14 different agencies would have a role in regulating it. Pigott said a steering committee did a lot of work this summer on a plan for legalizing the crop, which has three main uses:
1. Fiber, which is used in everything from rope to c lothing to parts of car manufacturing
2. Seed, which is used for animal feed
3. CBD oil, which is the biggest potential commercial use.
Pigott said oil producution from hemp requires a lot of hand labor: cutting, drying and hand-stripping the leaves. The CBD oil has many purported although not necessarily proven health benefits and is already widely sold in Mississippi. Pigott said there’s no quality control over those sources but that CBD oil made from hemp grown in Mississippi will have guarantees about what’s in it.
Pigott said he’s received more favorable comments about legalizing hemp than opposition and that the soil in South Mississippi would be good for growing the crop.
On the forestry side, Morgan said his committee has 11 members: five above Interstate 20, five below and one right in the center.
He said a key goal is getting more mills open to give landowners more options for selling their timber. The longer the distance the wood has to be trucked, the less profitable it is for landowners.
Prices are lower in North Mississippi because of a lack of mills, and Morgan said they’re trying to get private individuals to go into processing timber in those areas rather than major corporations. He said the big corporations don’t own as much land in North Mississippi as they do in South Mississippi so they can’t force a timber sale.
The situation is different in South Mississippi where there’s more forestry land and more mills.
Morgan said Marion County is blessed because it has the International Paper mill 30 miles to the south in Bogalusa, La., and the Georgia-Pacific mill 30 miles to the north in Monticello. Keeping those plants running 24 hours a day requires 300 daily truck loads, Morgan said, yet the region is actually growing much more than that as Mississippi has some 20 million acres of privately owned forest land.
“For every log truck that you see going up the road right now, there needs to be six more behind it. We’re growing it that fast,” Morgan said.
