GA Cotton Crop Likely A Total Loss, $2.5 Billion In Damages From Michael, But No Warming Here!!
CAMILLA, Ga. — Renee Moss was standing in her ruined cotton field, boot-toeing a fallen boll that looked like a dirty snowball and debating her husband, Clayton, about how maybe, just maybe, Hurricane Michael was a result of climate change. “Nope,” was the immediate response from Mr. Moss, a third-generation farmer in rural Mitchell County, where the storm’s 100-mile-per-hour winds last week destroyed a robust cotton crop at the precise moment when the bolls were fattest, fluffiest and set to be harvested.
A few minutes earlier, Mr. Moss’s insurance broker had told him that his losses were likely to be in the 80 to 100 percent range, the same faced by nearly every other farmer in this part of southwest Georgia. The area, which was directly in the path of the storm, is one of the largest bastions of multigenerational family farming in the country, and a major national producer of cotton, peanuts, sweet corn, pine timber and poultry.
“Look, I know the storms are making it unsustainable. If what’s happened this year happens next year, we’re done,” Mr. Moss, 38, told his wife. “But we’ve always had bad weather. Is it getting worse? Have we had three bad years in a row? Yeah. But I’m worried about the weather, not about climate change.” Ms. Moss, 41, shrugged. “House divided,” she said.
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But the destruction is already believed to be on a scale not previously seen in Georgia, a $65 billion-a-year agricultural powerhouse. The state’s total losses, clustered in the southwest, could top $2.5 billion, according to Gary W. Black, the state agriculture commissioner. The cotton crop this year could be a near total loss, with damage estimated at between $300 million and $800 million. Crop insurance will cover a fraction of that damage, in part because payouts are calculated on a 10-year average yield kept low by the damage done by Hurricane Irma last year, said Plenn Hunnicutt, an executive with South Georgia Crop Insurance. “That was nothing by comparison,” Mr. Hunnicutt said. “Everything south of Mitchell County, that’s basically gone now.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/hurricane-michael-cotton-agriculture-climate-change.html
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