Row crops and animal operations were the agricultural industries hardest hit by Hurricane Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
A preliminary report published on Tuesday by researchers at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences estimates growers lost between $40 million and $162 million of the year’s production.
According to the report, Helene impacted over 6.1 million acres of agricultural land, and the hardest hit area was the Big Bend. August’s Hurricane Debby affected less than half as much acreage but caused nearly $100 million more in losses.
Christa Court, who led the analysis, attributed the difference to Helene’s lower rainfall totals.
“If you remember, this particular storm moved through our region relatively quickly and was not particularly wet,” she said. “Hurricane Debby was a much wetter storm that came with more flood inundation for a wider amount of acreage.”
Researchers used an intensity index to evaluate how severely a given area was impacted by winds, rain and flooding.
They classified 42% of acreage affected by Hurricane Debby in the lowest intensity bracket, with winds of up to 95 mph and up to 12 inches of precipitation. During Hurricane Helene, nearly 95% of acreage fell into this category.
Even low-intensity conditions were enough to destroy cotton crops and deteriorate peanut plants. Field and row crops suffered the greatest losses, estimated at between $13 million and $48 million.
Production losses in animal operations were a close second, with losses expected to range between $12 million and $44 million. Suwannee, Lafayette and Gilchrist counties – some of the hardest hit by Helene – are dairy cow hubs.
In an interview shortly after Hurricane Helene, United Dairy Farmers of Florida president Ray Hodge said producers were already feeling the impact.
Barns, generators and grazing fields suffered extensive damage. Cows, meanwhile, experienced psychological stress, affecting their production cycles.
“Impacts to milk production can take six months or more to work their way through the milk herd and that’s real money,” Hodge said. “It’s hard to quantify.”
Other industries face the same dilemma in estimating the long-term impact of the storm.
“People say: ‘We can’t answer that until we get to the end of season and really know what happened,’” Court explained, “but that season is different for every crop.”
Compounding the impact from Hurricanes Debby and Helene created another challenge for researchers.
The hurricanes made landfall just 40 miles apart in the Big Bend region, meaning many of the same producers were hit twice.
“As much as we could, we tried to disentangle those two to make sure that we weren’t double counting any information,” Court said. Her team maintained separate surveys for each hurricane, instructing producers to submit only storm-specific impacts.
Still, Court acknowledged that Hurricane Debby influenced Hurricane Helene’s results.
Some growers who lost crops during Hurricane Debby hadn’t yet replanted by the time Helene arrived. They were spared additional damage simply because they had nothing more to lose.
Hurricane Helene may have also worsened the structural damage caused by Hurricane Debby.
The IFAS survey collected information from producers about infrastructure damage but didn’t quantify it. Respondents reported damage to barns, fences, tractors, farm homes, irrigation systems, and greenhouses among other properties.
The IFAS team will refine its economic analysis as growers continue to report losses from Hurricane Helene. Researchers aim to publish a final report in the first quarter of 2025.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
