By Clint Thompson
Five years ago, Hurricane Michael devastated the Southeast and altered the agricultural landscape, especially in Georgia.
Five years later, specialty crop producers are still coping with the devastation left by the Category 5 storm.
“I think one of the untold stories about Hurricane Michael is how much it affected agriculture; the total amount of dollar damage from everything, including all the houses that were destroyed at Mexico Beach and everything was about $25 billion,” said Pam Knox, University of Georgia Extension agricultural climatologist. “But of that, agriculture took almost $5 billion, and half of that was in Georgia. A lot of people were not paying attention to that. They saw all the destruction along the coast, and they didn’t really think about all the damage that there was to agriculture.”
Cotton and pecans, both in the middle of harvest seasons, were the Georgia crops that were impacted the most by the October storm. Pecans suffered $100 million in direct losses to the 2018 crop; $260 million in losses due to lost trees and $200 million in direct losses for future income. The pecan industry continues to feel the ripple effect of the hurricane five years later.
“It’s not over yet for a lot of those people that live in that area. They’ve gotten on with their lives for sure, but there’s still lasting damage. People who had pecan orchards, if they had to replace the trees and most of them did, it usually takes 10 years for those trees to get back to commercial levels. They’re only halfway there,” Wells said. “They don’t have that replacement for income. I’m sure a lot of them have grown other things and of course there’s been some insurance money that has helped as well. It’s not just to pecans either as cotton took a tremendous hit.”
Hurricane Michael was especially destructive considering how quickly it formed and moved its way in to the Gulf of Mexico. Knox said cotton growers were harvesting their crop 24 hours a day prior to Michael’s arrival.
“Michael was just unprecedented. We haven’t had a storm like that in Southwest Georgia in the lifetime of anybody living there. There have been other storms, but they haven’t been as strong. And they didn’t have much warning. It was only two days from the time it was declared a hurricane until when it made landfall,” Knox said.