By Clint Thompson
The Georgia Cotton Commission and University of Georgia (UGA) Cotton Team are providing guidance to producers impacted by hail damage from the storms this week.
Camp Hand, UGA Extension cotton agronomist, focused on the steps that growers need to take over the next week in surveying the aftermath.
“I have been getting pictures from agents and growers this morning, last night and even some yesterday from the day before, there’s definitely some (hail) out there,” Hand said. “First thing’s first, call your insurance man and just let them know that it happened. Start taking the necessary steps in that direction. You can’t do anything about it if it’s not on record. That’s the biggest thing to me, if you’ve got a problem make sure that they know it.
“Then, we don’t need to rush anything, because first thing, we can’t get back in the field. There’s no reason to be in any rush to terminate a crop or get a disk in the field or anything like that because we just can’t do it. But in the next week and a half, we’ll learn a lot about how the crop is going to respond. Let’s wait 5 to 10 days to see how it looks before we rush into anything.”
Dry Weather Needed
South Georgia has been saturated this week from heavy thunderstorms which spiked tornadoes and hail throughout the region. Farmers are yearning for dry weather that will allow them back in the fields to accurately assess what the crop looks like.
“At the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to help it is sunshine and warm weather. If you let it get some of that, let it start diverting resources back into recovering and producing some vegetative growth, then we can see what we’re dealing with,” Hand said.