Alma, GA |

Imagine working your entire life for something and then, in what feels like an instant, it gets destroyed by a hurricane. For some, that’s hard to imagine, however, for many across southeast Georgia, like Daniel Johnson, a row crop farmer in Pierce County, it very much is a reality.

“We’ve got damage. We’ve got some home damage. We’ve got shelter damage to back of barn damage. The good thing is, my family’s safe; that’s what it’s all about. We can replace material things, but the family’s safe, but we pray for everybody’s safety and maybe everything can get back to normal. You know, I don’t know what normal is anymore, but agriculture is hurting. The community’s hurting as a whole. Agriculture was already hurting because of crop prices and input costs, but now we’ve took a double hit, and Tropical Storm Debbie was pretty devastating to us for our crops and I never dreamed it all would come at one time, you know, 30 days apart you might as well say,” says Daniel Johnson, Owner of DL Johnson Farms.

According to Johnson, what makes this storm so devastating is how it basically kicked farmers when they were already down, as he says the year as a whole has been horrific, and now, as you can see, what crop they have been able to grow, has now been blown away.

“Cotton was already at a point that it was unprofitable. So, every bowl we could pick was going to be a plus for us and now we don’t have it. I think we’ll still be able to pick some cotton, some is probably not going to be harvestable, some of this has already been through drowning, droughts, and tropical storms. So, we’re beat from the get go. What people don’t understand is twenty years ago, commodity prices were the same as they are today, if not better,” says Johnson.

For now, Johnson says he has no choice but to continue on, as this year’s peanuts are just days away from being ready to harvest, but for cotton, he says it’s too early to tell if he’ll be able to or if it’s even worth harvesting.

“It’s going to be a wait and see. If we had an average crop, we’re forty, fifty percent less than what we had. There again, if we can save some of it, but is it going to cost more to save it than we’re going to make? We know that’s going to happen already. If we picked the fool crop, we were going to lose money, but we got to make the best of it and just hope the economy turns and things change. It kind of takes the words away from me, because you just don’t know sometimes what to think or what to do,” says Johnson.

However, despite the devastation, Johnson is still hopeful and optimistic everything will work out for them in the end.

“It’s just a wait and see game. We hope we all come out better than what we are, but we’ll overcome it somehow. This ain’t the first rodeo. We’ve had storms before but nothing like a year like this, let’s just say that,” says Johnson.

By: John Holcomb