Credit: Georgia Department of Agriculture
Credit: Georgia Department of Agriculture
Despite the shutdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Georgia’s vegetable farmers avoided disaster and instead are looking at a money-making year on crops that range from asparagus to zucchini.
State and federal purchase programs, gradual reopenings of restaurants and increased grocery store sales saved the day in Georgia.
Florida growers, who harvest earlier than Georgia farmers, weren’t as lucky. They lost big buyers, such as restaurants, hotels, cruise lines and schools, which typically buy 40% of all U.S. grown produce but were forced to temporarily shut down in the spring. Farmers in the Sunshine State had to plow under thousands of acres of crops or leave them on the vine to rot.
“We were very nervous going into the season,” said Brandi Corbett Hobby, who heads up sales for South Georgia Produce. At the family-run operation near Valdosta, they grow a wide variety of vegetables, from peppers to eggplants, on 1,500 acres, and plant both a summer and a fall crop. “We were thinking of pulling part of our crop and not planting,” she said.
But, she added, “thank God we did. ... It was a record year for us.”
That’s good news not only for the farmers. Agriculture is still Georgia’s largest single industry, with a total economic impact of $76 billion, including everything from farm product sales to workers’ salaries and peripheral industries like food processing. In many counties, farmers are major employers and buyers of goods that keep local economies floating and taxes coming in. A bad year in farming has impacts from local school spending to the state budget.
South Georgia Produce and other farms in Lowndes County, sold $18.2 million of bell peppers and $5.9 million of cucumbers in 2018, according to the most recent Farm Gate Value Report by the University of Georgia. Next door, Echols County sold $65.3 million worth of bell peppers. Vegetable sales have a $2.6 billion of economic impact on the state, the report says.
Credit: Georgia Department of Agriculture
Credit: Georgia Department of Agriculture
The early threat to vegetable sales would have been piling on trouble for many farmers. Georgia has been hit with a series of down or so-so years because of weather, such as Hurricane Michael in 2018, which flattened some fields.
“The past couple of years have been so depressed, we were like, we are doing this for fun because we are not making money,” Hobby said.
It was nice to have a year that looked to be a disaster turn into a very good one.
That was due to a number of factors. The U.S. Department of Agriculture bought up $3 billion worth of fresh produce and meat across the U.S., much of which was given to programs such as food banks, which were seeing record numbers of people.
State commissioner of agriculture Gary Black and others cooked up a plan to truck fresh Georgia produce to massive drive-through farmers markets, including many in metro Atlanta. The first one, in Cobb County last May, sold more than 6,000 boxes of everything from fresh strawberries to Vidalia onions.
Restaurants and hotels began opening; Mexican growers who compete with Georgia farmers shipped less because of problems; Florida’s vegetable disaster left markets open for Georgia growers. And FoodService Partners, a major packager of foods for institutions, opened in Milledgeville, buying thousands of pounds of Georgia produce weekly.
It was a confluence of good luck, decent weather and hard work.
“We’ve had wonderful demand,” said Sarah Will of Calhoun Produce in Ashburn, which is between Macon and the Florida line on I-75. Calhoun Produce sells strawberries, butterbeans and other vegetables straight to consumers and to grocery stores. It will start picking fall crops soon, and Will hopes demand stays high.
Charles Hall, the executive director of the Georgia Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association, said prices have held pretty strong.
“When I talk to a farmer, and he is not complaining about pricing, I know it’s going good,” he said.
“In March, I was singing the blues and said we could have real problems,” he said. “We’ve had three years of major losses, so we needed a little positive news.”
Other farmers, such as those who grow cotton and pecans, will begin harvesting their crops in the coming months. They face a different set of problems — Chinese tariffs. President Donald Trump imposed U.S. tariffs on Chinese products in 2018 and China retaliated with tariffs on many U.S. agricultural products that disrupted sales.
The two sides reached a large purchasing agreement early this year, but China has fallen far behind on fulfilling its promised purchases.
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