Moultrie, GA

Here in Moultrie, this is what remains of this bell pepper crop after summer storms ripped through Southwest Georgia last month; storms that brought damaging winds, rains, and hail. According to Sam Watson, Managing Partner of Chill C Farms, the storms couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the crop was just really getting started, and caused them to lose two thirds of their crop.

“We had picked this pepper twice. The first picking was kind of just a little light crowing of the crop just to kind of lighten the load a little bit. Then we had started the second harvest, of this particular field and then we didn’t even finish that night when it started raining the guys left; that was the night that the hail came and it hailed from here all the way down to the packing house,” says Watson. “It damaged this particular field of bell pepper just because of where the stage of the crop is probably where we suffered the most damage. We had damage in our eggplant, we had damage in our tomatoes, we had damage in cucumbers and pickles and even a little bit of damage in our squash, because of the stage they were in. The damage was not quite as severe, whereas here, we probably lost; we’re estimating somewhere around sixty percent of the crop.”

From there, things only continued to get worse, as Watson says it began to rain and didn’t stop for almost two weeks – causing even more damage and causing them to have to stop harvest on the crop.

“We tried to salvage some of it, but we ended up having trouble. After the hail came, it was obviously rain, and then it rained for an additional two weeks, so what the hail did not, destroy, we lost to just the amount of rain that we received, and all of the excessive moisture, so we eventually just had to abandon this field and walk away from it and basically leave,” says Watson. “When you harvest a crop like this, you’ve got to be able to harvest enough to pay the labor and to cover your costs of doing that, and the situation we were in was, there was not enough marketable product to harvest, to pay the help, and to package it and box it and then there again, ship across the United States.”

As difficult of a decision it was to just abandon the crop, Watson says that decision was made due to their bottom line and profit margins being so tight, as it would have been a complete waste of time, money, and resources to harvest.

“The margins and what we do here in agriculture and farming are so small; so small, and so, when something like this happens you immediately have to figure out how we can save money or not spend anymore money, and so that’s where you immediately pull the plug, you walk away from it, you stop, you go on to something else,” says Watson. “Unfortunately for us, it kept raining for about ten days after the hail, and so we ended up sending a lot of our help back home. Their contracts were almost up anyway, so we decided to send them home a couple of weeks early, so we got rid of some labor and we just kind of walked away from this field all together, we just had to, you know, cut our losses. That’s all you can do.”

By: John Holcomb