https://thefern.org/2026/03/how-white-south-africans-are-reshaping-the-mississippi-delta/
Mississippi residents who are not involved in agriculture are often shocked by their first encounters with men like Ramsden in the Delta, a place where Black sharecroppers once supplied the workforce on the region’s sprawling farms, and where the percentage of Black residents remains one of the highest in the country. Debates arise on Facebook: a few years ago, one user wondered whether the workers were there on “a gap year for the sons of South African plantation owners.” It only adds to the confusion that men like Ramsden do not fit the stereotype of an H-2A worker. The vast majority of U.S. agricultural visas go to Mexican citizens, and a great deal of the work is what is sometimes called “stoop labor,” ripping out weeds, handpicking fruit, hauling crates of produce. Kitted out in boots and a safari shirt, Ramsden looked more like a tourist than a farmhand.
Sometimes, Ramsden and his peers in Mississippi might hop down in the mud to lay irrigation pipe. But their work typically involves operating machinery. The region’s farms mostly grow commodity row crops such soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors running complex software; laborers monitor G.P.S.-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, an emeritus professor of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the U.S. first found jobs on the Great Plains in the nineteen-nineties, working on custom harvesting crews that travelled from farm to farm, to cut crops. Historically, this work had been a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students in the region. But in the nineteen-nineties, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Now South Africans represent the fastest-growing source of H-2A farm labor in the U.S.: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders has increased by more than four hundred per cent and the number of South Africans in the program has increased fourteenfold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa, in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers headed home. “If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms, said.
For the South Africans, part of the draw is money. Ramsden estimated that workers in Mississippi could make at least four times the wages they earned back home. But it’s not just the pay that sends them abroad—there’s also a feeling that they are escaping anti-white sentiment. Many of these men in the Delta are the descendants of colonists who, beginning in the eighteen-thirties, embarked on the “Great Trek,” a migration from the coast of South Africa into the region’s interior to establish farms, and, later, whole republics that were independent from the British Crown. They called themselves Afrikaners to indicate their commitment to what they saw as their homeland, unlike the Brits still tied to London.
