Georgia Magazine - January 2020 - 17

'My granddad originally built all this infrastructure.
My insurance is not going to cover what it will
cost to replace this now. We never expected this
kind of total devastation.'

COURTESY GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

-Kevin Rentz, a fourth-generation cattle, cotton,
peanut and soybean producer in Decatur County

those commodities, so it's been incumbent on us to lead the
nation in recovery."
The Georgia General Assembly wasted no time addressing
the storm's impact, convening in a special session in November
2018 to allocate $500 million toward recovery. For ag producers, the allocation included a $200 million Georgia Timber Tax
Credit Program to help forest and pecan orchard landowners
offset their losses, a Forest Debris Management Program targeting $20 million toward cleanup and $55 million for the Georgia
Development Authority's SAFETY 21 Loan Program, which
offers loans to farmers affected by the hurricane.
"The state government deserves credit," says Chuck Williams, director of the Georgia Forestry Commission (GFC). "Our
federal partners were on the scene, too, but the wheels move a
little slower in D.C. than they do in Atlanta."
"If the federal government took after Georgia, we would
be a much better country, there's no doubt," says Gerald Long,
president of the Georgia Farm Bureau Federation (GFB). The
GFB Foundation for Agriculture raised $650,000 for affected
farmers, but the need continues to be much greater than what
that sum was able to cover, Long says.
Exactly one year after the hurricane made landfall, Long
lamented the fact that Georgia had not yet received its share
of the $3 billion promised as part of the $19.1 billion disaster
aid package passed by Congress last June. Long's cattle and

row-crop farm in Bainbridge took a big hit from the
hurricane.
"Just day before yesterday, we finally got through
patching fences," he said in October. "No time's a good
time for a storm, but particularly in the middle of harvest season, it wreaked havoc."
Black, Long and Williams agree: Georgia's farmers
will wrestle with the impact of Hurricane Michael for
years to come.

Record yields become record losses
The year was on track to be a particularly good one
for Georgia agriculture.
"Cotton was set for a record yield in 2018, and prices were in a favorable position for vegetable producers,"
Black says. "Pecans were good. There was going to be
elevated production. Then, all of a sudden, it's gone."
Miley Adams owns farmland across the road from
Holton's farm in Camilla. A row-crop farmer, he had
harvested the peanuts and corn-but not cotton-
when Hurricane Michael raged through. He lost all the
season's cotton-600 acres' worth, valued at $360,000.
That was devastating, but cotton is an annual crop
that is planted each year. The loss of pecan trees hit him
harder.
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Georgia Magazine - January 2020

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