TIFTON — Dr. Joe Lewis has written a book that traces his life in Mississippi to the current day.

Lewis, a Tifton resident, has been honored multiple times for his entomology work at the University of Georgia Tifton Campus, including winning Israel’s Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2008 and by his alma mater, Mississippi State University, in 2019.

The title of Lewis’ book is “A New Farm Language: How a Sharecropper’s Son Discovered a World of Talking Plants, Smart Insects and Natural Solutions.”

“I grew up, I was in South Mississippi,” Lewis said in a recent interview. He was born in 1942 to a sharecropper father. The first five chapters of the book are devoted to Lewis growing up in that era.

“We had no running water, no electricity,” he said. “We didn’t have any well.”

It was not until a college dormitory that he lived somewhere with running water.

Lewis’ life and career have seen travel far beyond those days.

“I’ve seen the world from both sides,” he said, which has given him a unique perspective, not just of the technological changes, but also from his simpler youth to international success. The opening chapter of “A New Farm Language” contrasts his Wolf Prize win to his roots.

Changes are something Lewis discusses frequently, both the positive and negative.

In the final chapter, he thinks back on a trip to Mississippi for his 50th high school reunion and how much the area had physically changed. Lewis wrote that he thought back to the 1950s in the Magnolia State, “Get Big or Get Out,” large-scale industrial farming over the small, family farms of his youth.

“Which is good and bad,” Lewis said. “What has happened with industrial agriculture, we have done a lot of introduction making machines and pesticides and fertilizers. Those have been good, but like the use of painkillers and antibiotics,” he said, overuse can be bad. “What’s the risk that we are facing?”

Man’s relationship with the land and nature is something he reflects on often. Before lights, before other conveniences.

Beyond damage to the land, Lewis said he worries about losing man’s connection to the land.

“We’re losing our appreciation and understanding of nature,” he said. “That sort of is the backdrop.”

Lewis remembers being able to tell what time of day it was, not by a clock, but by the songs of birds. Mockingbirds in the mornings, owls and whippoorwills at night. Without electricity, “You learn the sights and sounds of nature.”

Not all has disappeared. He notes the “farm to table” movement in America, contracting with farmers for fresh produce. That was the same as his own youth, except the fresh produce was their survival instead of a meal out of the house.

By the late 1950s, Lewis’ father was earning much less from sharecropping and had to find other work as the bigger farms increased their hold of the market. Lewis attended junior college, then Mississippi State. Life was changing.

His youthful fascination with the natural world guided him in university.“I went to college and got into the profession,” Lewis said. A meeting with MSU’s entomology department head steered Lewis further, to a Ph.D.

At the end of his Ph.D., Lewis was offered a job at the Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton. A lifetime of professional success has followed.

Illustrations for “A New Farm Language” were provided by his longtime friend, the late Dr. Vincent Kessee. He pays tribute to Kessee in the opening acknowledgements, as well as his wife, Beth, his family and many others he has been close to through the years. Mark Schatzker wrote the foreword.

“A New Farm Language” is available through Acres USA.