For farmers, rain can be both a blessing and a curse. Without it, crops can’t grow, but too much of it can drown and kill the plants.
As Tropical Storm Debby makes its way across South Georgia, the region’s farmers are bracing for up to 20 inches of rain and the potentially devastating impacts that could bring to an industry that has already seen its share of disasters in recent years.
Debby made landfall Monday morning in the Big Bend of Florida. From there, “The storm is going to slow down and turn to the northeast, moving S-L-O-W-L-Y across the southeast part of the state,” Pam Knox, a climatologist at the University of Georgia, wrote in an email Monday to farmers.
The region is rich with farms. Nearly all the Georgia counties with more than 200,000 acres of farms are in the south of the state or on the coast, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent Census of Agriculture.
Arren Moses, a pecan grower with about 700 acres of trees in Uvalda, a small town in South Georgia, said he was worried high winds could topple trees with the soil already saturated after a wet season. He said the pecan industry has been struggling since the Trump administration kicked off a trade war with China, previously a large export market for Georgia’s nuts.
“We needed a win,” Moses said. “We needed a good crop after the last several years of depressed prices. This hurricane could be very detrimental to the pecan business if we get a massive amount of damage.”
Battered by disasters
Just last year, Hurricane Idalia’s 90 mph winds left fields of cotton a twisted mess and felled hundreds of pecan trees in South Georgia. In the aftermath, the federal government issued a disaster declaration for a 27-county area. In 2018, Hurricane Michael — the strongest storm on record to hit the Florida Panhandle — caused devastation on many farms in rural southwest Georgia as it pushed through the state.
As the climate changes, fruit farmers have also dealt with a series of painful losses caused by warm winters and spring freeze events.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
Now, Debby is hitting certain crops in the middle of the planting season.
Chris Butts, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, wrote in an email that most growers are currently in the process of preparing fields and planting fall crops. He said the amount of rain expected could be devastating for crops already planted.
“We are hopeful that the [storm] will move more quickly than expected so growers can get back in the fields to produce the fall vegetable crops that consumers rely [on] in the fall and early winter,” he said.
Handy Kennedy has a 1,200-acre farm in Cobbtown, about 75 miles west of Savannah. He has about 200 head of Black Angus cattle that he needs to move to higher ground as Debby approaches his fields.
But his main concern about the storm is how it may impact the 200 to 300 acres of hay he grows to feed his cattle. The grass is at peak protein levels now, but the rainfall is going to delay his harvest.
Cows require certain levels of protein in their diet and if Kennedy’s hay doesn’t meet those requirements, he will need to supplement it with other feed. Yet there’s nothing he can do to prepare.
“All you can do is just deal with it the best you can,” Kennedy said. “Nobody can really predict, you know, what Mother Nature is going to do,” Kennedy said.
If he has to buy supplemental feed, that’s an unexpected expense of thousands of dollars come wintertime. On top of that, his typical local sources of supplemental feed – cottonseed, peanut oil – could all potentially be affected by Debby, so he may have to buy from farmers outside of the state.
Taylor Sills, executive director of the Georgia Cotton Commission, said the immediate concern from Debby is damage to infrastructure — buildings, irrigation systems and equipment. In those areas that are expecting 10 or more inches of rain, he said rot and general production losses are also a concern.
Storm damage could compound already-high production costs that Sills said outweigh the price of cotton by about 20 cents a pound right now.
“It’s just a really bad situation out here,” he said. “A hurricane taking production from you just puts you deeper in that hole.”
UGA’s Knox expects Debby to cause at least $1 billion in damage.
Kennedy, who is also co-founder of the farmer coalition AgriUnity, hopes the federal government will assist farmers with any impacts from Debby.
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