farmers in the sky

For nearly a hundred years, ag pilots have been gliding through Mississippi skies.

- BOYCE UPHOLT

Delta Air Lines operates more than 15,000 flights each day, shuttling passengers between 661 destinations across more than 100 countries. The company’s name is an indication of its past, and Mississippi’s too. After a successful experiment in 1921, in which an Army pilot sprayed lead arsenate dust across a tree farm and successfully killed destructive moth larvae, the military set up operations just outside of Vicksburg. Their target: the boll weevil, a beetle that was ravaging cotton country. Airborne spraying worked.

Soon, agricultural aviation—then known by its old name, “crop-dusting”—was a booming business. Using retrofitted military biplanes with open cockpits, pilots crisscrossed farmland across the South. HuffDaland Dusters, based in Louisiana, was the world’s first commercial agricultural air service; its 18 planes constituted the largest privately owned air fleet in the world. When the company changed hands in 1928, a secretary— whose sharp mind would carry her up, eventually, to an executive suite—suggested a new name, Delta, an homage to where it all began.

Delta may have moved on to different business, but the region remains the epicenter of agricultural aviation. The planes appear each year in early springtime, a marker of the annual flourishing: roughly 230 pilots across the state, doing their part to coax corn and beans and cotton from the ground. Steve Brown, president of the Mississippi Agricultural Aviation Association, figures that across Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, there are more ag pilots than in the rest of the country combined.