Photo: Facebook | Moses Pecans
AgricultureDive.com reported that just days after the hurricane made landfall as a Category 4 storm on 28 September, it was apparent that farming communities in the states of Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas would face devastating losses.
“Every commodity in the state has been damaged by the storm,” the Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, said during a media conference.
According to Kemp, at least 107 poultry facilities were “damaged or totally destroyed by the storm”.
Meanwhile, cotton farmers in Georgia were reporting yield losses of between 35% and “a total loss,” according to the Georgia Cotton Commission.
Dairy farms and other food-processing facilities had also been severely affected due to widespread power outages.
The AgricultureDive report added that the hurricane had destroyed businesses and farms, and was expected to “upend cotton, peanut and pecan [nut] crops just as harvests get underway”.
“Losses will extend well beyond the farm, as cotton gins, other agribusinesses, and rural communities will feel the ripples of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath for years to come,” the commission said in a Facebook post.
The economic impact on the cotton industry was expected to “be in the hundreds of millions of dollars”, according to the commission.
Kemp added that financial losses across the agriculture sector were likely to be higher than those suffered during Hurricane Michael in 2018, which ultimately amounted to losses of more than US$2 billion (about R35 billion).
According to AgricultureDive, farmers had shared photos of uprooted pecan trees, flooded farm fields, and destroyed poultry houses on social media.
Producers are now being urged to make use of the US Department of Agriculture’s Disaster Assistance Discovery Tool to help them asses which disaster assistance programmes were available to them.
Although farmers are likely to quickly turn their attention to cleaning-up operations in an effort to salvage what is left of their crops, state officials urged them to first thoroughly document the damage.
Georgia’s Agriculture Commissioner, Tyler Harper, said at a media conference that the department needed as much information as possible to ensure that farmers received the required resources and assistance as quickly as possible.
More than 100 people across several US states were reported to have died during the storm, with the death toll likely to rise as rescue operations continue.
