Dorothy Grady pulled at a tuft of green fronds sprouting from one of an array of soil-filled buckets sitting in the driveway of her house. A plump carrot, five inches long and brilliant orange, popped out. Nearby, a sage shrub grew from another bucket, and scallions crowded a squat grow bag. In about three weeks, Grady would kick off the spring growing season on the land she cultivates around Shelby, Mississippi, including two plots at the now-closed middle school across the street, a small grove of peach and pear trees up the road, and five acres outside of town. She was ready to start planting eggplants, melons, tomatoes and a cornucopia of other produce that would soon end up in the homes of 127 nearby residents.  Dorothy Grady is one of almost a dozen local growers supplying produce to Delta GREENS. Credit: Elizabeth Hewitt Shelby, a few miles east of the Mississippi River, is surrounded by flat, fertile farmland. But Grady’s vegetables and fruit are some of the only crops around that make it to local plates. The vast majority of Mississippi Delta farms are devoted to commodity crops like soy and corn. Grady is one of almost a dozen local growers supplying produce to Delta GREENS, a collaborative research project that is delivering fresh ingredients to residents of Bolivar, Sunflower and Washington counties with diabetes and monitoring the health impacts. This “food is medicine” project is one of a number of initiatives that are supporting farmers and expanding the market for locally grown produce in this western Mississippi region. The benefits run in both directions: At the same time that community members are getting access to these nutritious ingredients, the small-scale farmers who grow them are getting a leg up. “What we’re trying to do is build cooperative development amongst the farms,” says Julian Miller, founding director for the Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice in Jackson, a co-principal investigator for Delta GREENS, and a long-time local food advocate in the Delta region. “Ultimately, we want to be able to give them the capacity to scale and capture the broader market.” The 200-mile-long Delta region, on the fertile floodplain sandwiched between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, has a rich agricultural history. Once known for growing cotton, today the area is dominated by ridged fields growing commodities that will be processed into animal feed or ethanol. In the past, many Delta residents cultivated fruits and vegetables, says Miller, yet over time, pressures like farming mechanization and loss of land eroded the practice. Miller, a fifth-generation Delta resident who grew up a few miles away from Shelby, never saw anyone with a vegetable garden. “That tradition was lost, as far as growing your food,” he says.  Today, despite the abundance of fertile land, very little of it is dedicated to edible crops. About 90 percent of the food people eat in this region is grown elsewhere and imported. “That’s the irony,” Miller says.