Fort Valley, GA |

It’s a sight producers are excited to see; harvest season. It’s no doubt been a challenging year for producers, especially for those in the path of Hurricane Helene, who, according to Area Pecan Agent, Andrew Sawyer, have seen a majority of their crop decimated and many of their orchards completely leveled.

“We believe that it’s about a seventy-five percent crop loss inside the main direct path of the storm. For tree loss, 400,000 trees over fifty-one counties and 48,000 acres. The economic loss is how much does it cost to replant the tree and how much does it cost to manage that tree for seven years? So, moving to the future income loss, if you didn’t lose that tree, how much would that tree give you if you never lost it for seven years? So, the numbers we have are about a thousand dollars a tree for seven years which comes out to about 417-million-dollar loss. The total loss Hurricane Helene will be around 600 million dollars to the pecan industry in Georgia,” says Andrew Sayer, Area Pecan Agent.

Hurricane Helene however was just one difficulty for growers, as they battled volatile weather all season long.

“They went through a lot of heat and they can take heat but that heat could be an issue, we’ll have to see. Back in June and we went through a drought for five weeks, but in July it started raining and it rained solid again from July through August, and that’s a lot of pressure on the fungicide,” says Sawyer.

Those challenges with the growing season only compounded as their inputs, such as their fungicides, are a huge expense for producers.

“We’ve seen a really strong increase in the inputs, especially since 2021, and for this crop, we depend on fungicide application to hold back pecan scab. We have fungicides that work, and they work very well, but they have to be on a schedule. When it rains, the way it changes is it takes a fourteen-day schedule down to a ten day. So, it does put pressure on those inputs, great pressure on the inputs,” says Sawyer.

To add insult to injury, producers have now seen the price for their crop drop twice since Hurricane Helene made landfall, which Sawyer says is in large part to global market competition and is a real concern for many producers who are already struggling to just break even.

“We compete now with Mexico and they have about half the input costs that we have, without the regulations. South Africa competes with us, so your export market is the in-shell market and we’ve been changing our varieties over back to a shelled market, but we really depend a lot on the domestic and that’s where this puts real pressure on us. Once you get into the price range that we’re at right now, for desirable, I mentioned that before, it’s breakeven price. It’s not much below two dollars, and that of course, is the inputs,” says Sawyer.

By: John Holcomb