By Clint Thompson
One of Georgia’s top agricultural commodities experienced as much damage as any from Hurricane Helene when it moved through the region on Sept. 26 and 27.
Taylor Sills, Georgia Cotton Commission’s (GCC) executive director, said initial assessments has Georgia cotton growers losing at least 33% of this year’s crop.
“The Monday before Hurricane Helene came, that’s when NASS, National Agricultural Statistics Services, does their crop progress reports, and on that day, we were 1% done harvesting cotton and 68% of acres were at open boll. That leaves you very susceptible to these types of storms as we’ve seen from September and October hurricanes from the last several years,” Sills said.
“(The storm) went up through one of main cotton-producing areas. It wreaked a lot of havoc in the process. Here we are five days later, we estimate that between talking with growers and Extension people, we’ve lost a good third of Georgia’s cotton crop for 2024, at least. There will be other effects down the road; when pickers and sprayers go through tangled cotton; cotton bolls that never opened after they got whipped around in the storm. That’s what we think we lost immediately.”
The University of Georgia Extension Service is in the process of quantifying the damage results from its assessments across the impacted acreage.
What Was Different About This Storm?
“What’s different about this, is it went through so many larger communities, as so many more houses of growers got destroyed. Our deepest prayers and sympathies are with the people that lost loved ones in the process. It just seems to have had a lot more personal devastation,” Sills said. “In the past, we’ve moved straight through talking about commodity losses and things like, but so many people are without power and so many people are out of their homes. So many people just have different levels of impact, not just here, but in the Carolinas as well with what we see on the news.”