Hurricane Michael: A likely $4 billion blow to Georgia, Florida farms and timber

Andrew J. Skerritt | Tallahassee Democrat

Show Caption Hide Caption Hurricane Michael: Georgia farm damage seen in aerial footage Flyover footage captured on October 12, 2018 shows destruction to Georgia poultry, pecans, peanuts, and cotton farms.

In 2017, Maxwell Pecan Farm in Whigham harvested the best crop it had ever picked.

The bounty of a year ago for this family outfit less than an hour north of Tallahassee seems a distant memory this week after Hurricane Michael. The Category 4 storm swept through the Panhandle and South Georgia, knocked down trees and broke limbs and swept green pecans to the ground.

"It’s bad. We lost a lot of trees. A lot of trees were uprooted. We lost even more limbs from trees still standing," said Jerod Maxwell, head of the Maxwell Pecan Farm.

"Timing was the worse part of this. We were on the cusp of harvesting."

The monster storm decimated Florida and Georgia's valuable cotton and pecan crops and the timber industry. It knocked over dozens of poultry houses, elevators and silos, causing untold financial losses as farmers were anticipating another harvest.

“For farm families in southwest Georgia, their lives will be changed forever," said Andy Lucas, a spokesman for the Georgia Farm Bureau. "In October and November in Tallahassee it means football. In Georgia, it means harvest."

Arc of Ruin: A blow-by-blow account of how Hurricane Michael laid waste to our communities

The Georgia Department of Agriculture estimates farm damages to be as high as $2.8 billion. Meanwhile, in North Florida, Timber industry losses alone are almost half that amount. The Florida Department of Agriculture estimates Michael damaged 3 million acres of timberland to the tune of $1.3 billion.

In more easterly Leon and Wakulla counties, after Michael's high winds blew down cattle fences some livestock escaped but most were recovered. Farm buildings, wells and pieces of farm equipment were also damaged, said Les Harrison, director of the Wakulla County Extension Office who has been charged with assessing Michael's farm damage in the Big Bend.

“As you go west, it’s much more severe. In Jackson, Calhoun and Washington counties, it is an almost total loss of the cotton crop,” said Harrison, who compares Michael's destruction to the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Ivan in 2005. “This was a bad one. It really injured commercial agriculture.”

North of the state line, Michael was equally brutal to Georgia's cotton crop. The storm cut a devastating path through the heart of the Peach State's cotton-growing region, said Richey Seaton, executive director of the Georgia Cotton Commission.

"We’ve had tremendous damage. The losses range from farmers who have lost 20 percent of their crop to those who said 'I don’t have anything left to harvest,' " Seaton said. "We are trying to do our best to see what the losses are going to be. Once we know what we’ve lost, we have to move forward and bring help to farmers."

The impact of Michael is a double-whammy. Not only did the Georgia farmers have a potentially big cotton crop, said Seaton, but they also were anticipating high market prices.

"They’ve lost a good crop and miss out on a good income year," said Seaton, whose membership represents 1.4 million acres of cotton under cultivation.

Like a plague of locusts, Michael spared no farmers. Poultry is the largest farming sector in Georgia, which is the largest poultry producing state in America – Georgia produces 5 million birds a day, said Mike Giles, president of Georgia Poultry Federation.

More than 90 poultry houses were destroyed or significantly damaged during the hurricane, Giles said. Processing plants in the hurricane-affected areas stopped operating for a few days but are back online.

There is no exact count of the number of birds affected, but the loss was "less than half a day’s production,” he added.

Unlike chicken, pecans aren't an essential part of the American diet. But the nuts are an increasingly lucrative slice of the farming sector in South Georgia and North Florida.

Maxwell Pecan Farm has about 250 acres of orchards. Of that, 138 acres of trees are on the family’s farm in Whigham. The rest, including 30 to 40 acres in Havana and Concord in Gadsden County, are leased from other owners.

"We lost of pecans that were really getting close to harvest time, but they were still green on the trees. Now they're on the ground and not ready to harvest," Maxwell said while doing cleanup after the storm.

This has been an up and down season, Maxwell said. A tornado in July damaged many trees in South Georgia, but he was counting on his Florida pecans to make up for the shortfall.

"Florida was looking good," he said. "I was expecting to have the best crop I ever had in Florida. This took our 30 or 40 trees. Then came Michael."

Contact Andrew Skerritt at askerritt@tallahassee.com or follow him @andrewjskerritt on Twitter.

Hurricane Michael's inland aftermath:

Mourning Michael's victims