When Hurricane Helene landed in Florida three weeks ago, Jason Madison was alone at his place, which doubled as a shrimp storefront in Keaton Beach. When the wind started howling and the bay began to blow, Madison decided to flee. It was the right call. When he returned home the next morning, he found that the nearly 20-foot storm surge had torn it apart. Dead fish and broken furniture littered the landscape. Almost everything in the building was lost, taking with it a cornerstone of its livelihood.
“I had five tanks down there where I stored shrimp because we sell everything live, but everything is gone now,” says Madison, a commercial bait and shrimp farmer for the past 23 years. He paused to take in the scattered debris. “Well, the pieces are up.” All Helene left behind is a waterlogged shell of what used to be. He doesn’t know how, or even if, he will rebuild.
Stories like this play out all over the Southeast. The storm hit six statescausing billions of dollars in losses to crops, livestock and aquaculture. Just 13 days later, Milton walked across Floridaleaving millions without power and hampering ports, feed facilities and fertilizer plants along the state’s west coast.
Preliminary estimates indicate that Helene, one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest hurricanes since Katrina in 2005, toppled hundreds of thousands of businesses across the Southeast and devastated much of the region’s agricultural operations. Milton’s impact was more limited, but the two disasters are expected to reduce feed and fertilizer supplies and increase production costs, which could drive up prices for things like chicken and fruit in the coming months and years.
The cumulative effect of the two storms will “create a direct impact on agricultural production,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University.
When a farm, an orchard, a farm or any other agricultural operation is damaged in a disaster, it often leads to a drop in production, or even brings it to a standstill. That slowdown inevitably ripples through the companies that sell things like seed and fertilizer and equipment. Even those growers and producers who manage to hang on — or aren’t directly affected at all — may find damage to roads and other critical infrastructure hampers the ability to get their goods to market.
Early reports suggest that this is already happening. Downed trees, flooded roads and congested highways disrupted key transportation routes across the Southeast, while ports across the region suspended operations because of the storms, compounding a slowdown that followed a port workers’ strike along the Gulf and East Coast.
Helene dismantled farming operations that serve as hubs for the country’s food supply chain. Cataclysmic winds destroyed hundreds poultry houses across Georgia and North Carolina, accounting for more than 25 percent of the machinery used to produce most of the nation’s chicken meat. An analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that the region was hit by Helene produced about $6.3 billion worth of poultry products in 2022, with more than 80 percent of that coming from the worst-affected parts of both states. In Florida, the storm flattened about one in seven broiler houseswhich the Farm Bureau noted, exacerbating losses throughout the region that “will not only reduce the immediate supply of poultry, but also hamper local production capacity for months or even years.”
The storm uprooted forests, vegetable fields and row crops throughout the region. Georgia produces more than a third of the nation’s pecans, and some growers have lost all their trees. Farmers in Floridaone of the country’s leading producers of oranges, peppers, sugar and orchids, has also reported sharp production losses, facing an uncertain future. The rain and flooding unleashed by Helene has battered livestock operations in every affected state, with the situation in western North Carolina so dire that local agriculture officials crowdfunding feeds and other supplies to help farmers who lost their hay due to rising water. Those who work the sea are also affected; mussel farmers along the Gulf Coast are grappling with the losses they suffered when Helene’s storm surge destroyed their supplies.
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All told, the counties affected by Helene produce about $14.8 billion in crops and livestock each year, with Georgia and Florida accounting for more than half of that. If even one-third of that output was lost to the two hurricanes, the loss could total nearly $5 billion, according to the Farm Bureau.
Preliminary estimates from the Department of Agriculture indicate that the one-two punch more than $7 billion in crop insurance payouts. On October 15, the USDA reported that $233 million in payments were allocated to producers so far.
As bad as it is, it could have been worse for both consumers and farmers nationwide. Florida is home to the highest concentration of fertilizer manufacturing plants in the country. Twenty-two of the state’s 25 phosphate landfills, several of which are owned by the operating power plant Mosaic, was in Milton’s way. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, shut down operations before the storm and has since announced that it is maintaining “limited damage” to its plants and warehouses. (But the Tampa Bay Times reported that one facility was who struggled with water intrusion following Helene and was overrun during Miltonlikely sending water contaminated with phosphate waste flowing into Tampa Bay.) The storm also halted operations for several days at Port Tampa Bay, which handles about a quarter of the nation’s fertilizer exports.
Production impacts from both hurricanes may be felt most acutely by the Sunshine State’s struggling citrus industry, which has long been plagued by disease and destructive hurricanes. Any additional losses could further inflate costs for commodities such as orange juice, which have reached record highs this year, according to Lee, the agricultural economist. “In the face of hurricane shocks, agricultural production in southern states like Florida will take it on the chin,” he said.
But pinpointing the effect of a single storm on consumer prices is not only extremely difficult, it requires many years of research, Lee cautioned. Although all signs point to Hurricane Ian being partly responsible for the record food prices that followed that storm in 2022, the pressure the hurricane put on costs compounded other factors, including global conflict, droughts in breadbasket regions and the bird flu epidemic that devastated the poultry sector.
Even so, there’s still a chance that continued disruption to ports and trucking routes could cause “the entire food supply chain to experience additional stress from rising prices” associated with moving those goods, Lee said. If that turns out to be the case, “ultimately, when you go to the supermarket, you’ll end up finding more expensive commodities, generally.”
One of the biggest unknowns remains the question of how many storm-weary operations it will simply shut down. Industrial-scale businesses will certainly recover, but the rapid succession of devastating hurricanes may discourage family farms and small producers from rebuilding and abandoning their livelihoods for less vulnerable enterprises.
“This is what we call a compound disaster. You’re still dealing with the effects of one particular storm while another storm hits,” said economist Christa Court. She directs the University of Florida’s economic impact analysis program, which specializes in rapid determinations of agricultural losses after disasters. “We did see after Hurricane Idalia that there were businesses that just decided to get out of business and do something else because it was so badly affected.”
Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
Madison isn’t sure what’s next for his shrimp operation. He is too focused on saving what he can to think that far ahead. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. He couldn’t afford flood insurance, so he’s not sure how much financial support he’ll end up getting to help him rebuild, even as he’s still recovering from Hurricane Idalia, which Florida’s Big Bend area bumped in August. “The last few years, it’s just things breaking down, and times are getting tough … it’s like, what can you do?”
As the world continues to warm, more and more farmers may face the same question.
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story.
