Hurricane Helene caused damage to Georgia farming. Farmers need more than crop insurance

Between and around Valdosta and Augusta – two of Georgia’s hardest hit cities from Hurricane Helene – there is a 30-mile-wide path of destruction to agriculture and farmland.

Georgia farmers were gearing up to harvest millions of dollars worth of fall crops such as cotton, blueberries, bell peppers and squash. But the hurricane winds that ranged from 79 to 111 mph in Georgia destroyed crops, leaving most of it unsalvageable for some farmers, instantly pulling money from farmers’ pocketbooks.

“To call the damage catastrophic would be an understatement, it’s difficult to put into words,” said Matthew Agvent, communications director of the Georgia Agricultural Commission. “It looks like a 100-mile-wide tornado hit that part of the state.”

Georgia farmers say the financial loss is expected to have both immediate and longstanding effects. Many in the industry don’t have crop insurance, and getting a farm back to its normal operations after a disaster such as Hurricane Helene can take years. Because of this, there’s a bipartisan effort for Congress to swiftly provide funding to help farmers. President Joe Biden has indicated support for this.

“We can’t wait, people need help now,” Biden said during a news briefing at Shiloh Pecan Farm in Georgia last week.

Anne Schechinger, the Midwest director of the Environmental Working Group, said only 20% of farmers in the U.S. have crop insurance, premiums are rising, and the way insurance programs are set up prioritizes mainly large commodity crops.

Loss of fall harvest in Georgia

Alex Cornelius has a 375-acre blueberry farm in Manor, about halfway between Valdosta and Waycross, and estimates he lost $1 million from the storm.

“I’ve never been without power before,” he said, six days after the storm came through and still without power. “One-hundred twenty of our 375 acres were not insured because the blueberry bushes were under three years old, and those are uninsurable.”

Cornelius described the bushes that were blown over from the high winds completely leaning over, which is impossible to correct. It won’t be until 2027 or 2028 before his farm is back to producing as it was before because of the time it takes for the bushes to grow.

Justin Corbett of the Corbett Brothers Farm has 4,000 acres of farms across five counties at the border of Georgia and Florida. Three are in Georgia and two are in Florida. They sell squash to wholesalers, food services and retail. Someone in an East Coast grocery store might notice a lack of squash from Georgia in a month due to this storm, Corbett said.

The eye of the hurricane went over this area. Gusts were still in Category 3 range at 111 mph or greater.

“Part of the reason we’re spread out over five counties is to dodge bad weather events but this one was so fast and wide, it covered everything,” Corbett said. “There is structural and tree damage everywhere.”

Hurricane Helene was “exceptionally” large in size, according to lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva of AccuWeather.

“Tropical storm force winds extended hundreds of miles away from the center of the circuit,” DaSilva said. “I mean it was very very impressive how wide this was.”

Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified from warmer Gulf waters, which DaSilva connected to climate change.

“If the storm was a category 1 or 2 you wouldn’t have the winds we had,” he said.

Corbett decided a few years ago to forgo crop insurance because it’s “cost-prohibitive”, despite being hit by high winds from Hurricane Idalia and a lot of damaging rain from Hurricane Debby.

TJ Moore of Moore Farmers, down the street from Cornelius Blueberries, has a diverse variety of crops.

His farm grows squash, cucumber, bell pepper, hot peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupe, sweet corn, green beans and okra.

He estimates he lost $7 million worth of produce.

“Bell pepper is the only thing we have insurance for,” Moore said. “We have 150 acres of bell pepper. You have to keep in mind before you even pick a bell pepper with labor and everything else you have about $14,000 to $15,000 worth of investment per acre.”

Moore also opted out of crop insurance for most of his farm because the insurance payout isn’t worth what someone actually claims, he said.

“After COVID our inputs and policies went up, but our payouts did not, so there was a year or two we quit insurance.”

Moore will try to sell what he can, but he said Helene took his fall harvest.

Cotton was hit especially hard from the storm. The Agriculture Commission thinks there will be a 35% loss from all the states hit by Helene.

The USDA crop insurance program is meant to work for large commodity farmers who work with cotton, corn, soybean or peanuts.

“ Crop insurance is an acre-based program, the more acres, the more subsidies,” Shenlinger said. “Taxpayers pay 63% and farmers pay only 37% for their premium.”

Congress would need to OK more aid

With so few farmers having crop insurance and large amounts of unsalvageable crops, Sen. Jon Ossoff and Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper sent letters to Congress last week asking for additional support.

Without immediate bipartisan federal support, many farmers are worried about how they will make it.

“We’re farm people, we don’t have 401Ks,” said Russ Goodman, state senator and chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture & Consumer Affairs. “We are trying to get a bipartisan push to get some ag disaster funding.”

Goodman co-signed a letter with Harper on Sept. 30, which was sent to Congress requesting immediate action to support farmers and producers via a Block Grant.

“The emergency declaration allows farmers to access emergency loans and lines of credit,” Agvent explained. “This letter with Goodman and Harper is a block grant that would be much quicker. Something similar was done after Hurricane Michael and it helped.”

Agvent said the amount is determined by Congress.

But Congress is currently out of session until Nov. 11 due to election season. A special session would have to be called.

A day after Harper’s letter, Ossoff and Rep. Austin Scott led a bipartisan push for disaster relief with signatures from 34 lawmakers from the Southeastern U.S. The letter urged congressional leadership to work with them and the Biden administration to “ensure disaster relief resources are made available to agricultural producers.”

“To prevent deep and lasting economic damage to the agricultural industry in the southeastern United States, it is imperative that Congress make appropriations as soon as possible upon the completion of damage assessments to fully fund unmet agricultural disaster relief needs in our states and across the nation,” Ossoff, Scott, and colleagues wrote to congressional leadership. “Farmers and growers nationwide, not only those damaged by Helene, have now faced multiple growing seasons without sufficient federal support. Our constituents are counting on us to act swiftly.”

Data from the Environmental Working Group shows that Southeast Georgia has been hit hard by other extreme weather events like drought, making crop insurance payments upwards of a billion dollars in Georgia between 2001-2022.

“We have to supplement disaster assistance and we need to do it soon,” Ossoff said during an AgNet media interview on Oct. 2.

On Oct. 3, President Joe Biden and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited Shiloh Pecan Farm, 15 minutes north of Valdosta in Ray City, to assess the damages from Hurricane Helene.

For those that do have crop insurance, Vilsack gave reassurance that the USDA is working hard to get paperwork moved through quickly.

“We’re working with crop insurance companies now to expedite payments so farmers will receive help in November, if not sooner,” Vilsack said. “ We’re streamlining paperwork required to document required to document losses and assess the impacts of recovery activities so we can move more quickly.”

About 38,000 crop insurance policies have been potentially impacted by Hurricane Helene throughout the states affected by the storm, according to a USDA press release .

A USDA spokesperson said in an email that “20,000 of those are in Georgia.”

If farmers need help, a stress hotline for farmers is available at 883-381-7242, 24/7, Vilsack said. “USDA is committed for the long road of recovery.”