We’ve had a little over a week to sort through the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene upon our pecan industry. Its a difficult thing to see in person and to put into words. We have not seen a storm with this level of destruction in the past. The damage begins in Brooks and Lowndes counties and extends north, north-east about 260 miles. As mentioned in the previous post, almost all the damage is East of I-75 once you reach Tift County. Governor Kemp has announced 49 counties as eligible for federal disaster assistance. These include the following:
Appling, Atkinson, Bacon, Ben Hill, Berrien, Brooks, Bryan, Bulloch, Burke, Butts, Camden, Candler, Chatham, Charlton, Clinch, Coffee, Colquitt, Columbia, Cook, Echols, Emanuel, Evans, Glascock, Glynn, Irwin, Jeff Davis, Jefferson, Jenkins, Johnson, Lanier, Laurens, Liberty, Lincoln, Long, Lowndes, McDuffie, Montgomery, Newton, Pierce, Richmond, Screven, Tattnall, Telfair, Toombs, Treutlen, Ware, Washington, Wayne, and Wheeler Counties.
Pecans are grown to some extent in virtually all of these counties, including Richmond, which is largely an urban county. The acreage affected depends on what source of information you are evaluating. Farm Gate data and USDA NASS data are based on grower surveys. Satellite imagery provides a less subjective and perhaps more accurate approach to solving the acrege problem. Based on 2019 land satellite surveys supplied by the American Pecan Council, Georgia had 197,250 acres of pecans at the time of the survey. From these numbers the storm-affected area accounts for approximately 1/3 of Georgia’s production area. The American Pecan Council has approved the funding of another survey by Land IQ using imagery from 2021 and that generated from another satellite scheduled to fly over the area this week to evaluate post-storm acreage and potentially tree loss. Additionally, I am working with Dr. Jeff Cannon, a spatial ecologist at The Jones Center at Ichauway , to evaluate satellite imagery to come up with a percentage of biomass loss from orchards, which also will help us to more objectively determine the extent of damage. Through the use of all of this imagery along with ground-truthing of the affected area with our own eyes, we should be able to provide a fairly accurate picture of the pecan losses from Hurricane Helene.
Based on current knowledge of what we can see from the ground, we estimate a 75% crop loss in the storm damaged area. This is an average across the entire area and includes lighter losses on the fringes of the storm and nearly complete loss in the more intensely damaged areas. Currently, that would place the direct 2024 crop loss at just over 36 million lbs. We will continue to refine this estimate as needed as we accumulate more information. These losses include nuts lost from blown down or destroyed trees as well as green, in-shuck nuts blown from trees that survived the storm. There could be additional losses accumulated during the cleanup process and in quality losses from damaged nuts that remain on the tree. Such losses take more time to manifest themselves.
I can’t say enough about the support Mary Bruorton, GPGA Executive Director and the rest of the Georgia Pecan Growers Association staff have provided in support of our growers during this time. The GPGA has been instrumental in helping to develop and disseminate information to decision makers in government and public agencies as well as to growers about what resources are already available to help them. Sign up for their newsletter here to receive that information.
Thanks to these efforts growers should be aware that FSA has provided a waiver to allow farmers to self-assess damage without waiting for FSA personnel to visit farms. Just be sure to take photos of the damage and keep up with hours of labor and each piece of equipment use during cleanup for use when ECP funds are made available. Growers should contact their local FSA to sign up for ECP beginning October 15, 2024.
We’ve had many questions regarding how to handle remaining nuts in the orchard and whether or not they are marketable. Most remaining trees lost the largest percentage of their nuts when they were blown off the trees in the green shuck. These are not salvageable. Even if the nuts inside the shuck are far enough along to be mature, if the shucks won’t open it is not economically viable to de-shuck them. There is no way to know for sure at this point how much of the remaining crop in storm damaged areas will continue to mature normally and be eligible for harvest. There will likely be a lot of variation and almost assuredly some losses. Leaning trees which continue to have enough root to keep the trees green and alive will likely continue to mature some of their nuts, although that depends on the damage to shucks and stems in each tree. If these nuts do open normally, the nuts will likely be marketable but check them and be aware that the potential for quality loss is there, even at a late stage, if the flow of water and nutrients to those nuts has been affected.
Growers should focus primarily on cleanup of fallen trees in the orchard. In many of these severely damaged orchards it likely not feasible to try and work the clean up around the nuts. Get the trees cleaned up and removed and then evaluate the potential for harvest. Surviving upright trees in much of this area have lost much of their crop. There will of course be variation given location of the orchard and variety. Some orchards may retain a decent crop but from what I have seen, this looks to be a smaller percentage than we have seen from past hurricanes. Even with Michael, we saw a lot of the standing trees hold onto more than 50% of their crop. I do not believe this to be the case with this storm, certainly not in the most severely affected regions. There is a much lower percentage of the crop left on standing trees with Helene.
Bearing trees older than 6-7 years old and leaning more than about 30 degrees generally will not be worth trying to stand back up. If this is tried anyway, as I’m sure it will be in many cases, be sure to cut the tops of the trees back significantly before righting. This is the only chance the tree has. The further the lean and larger the tree, the less likelihood of righting successfully. They simply lose too much root -first when leaned over by the wind and secondarily as it is righted -to supply the tree with the water and nutrients needed for survival. Righted trees often die back slowly or blow over again in the next storm. Trees that have only a slight lean and remain green and secured in the ground by their roots will likely survive better without righting.
I will post more information from the satellite surveys as they become available, hopefully over the next week or two.
