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When Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida three weeks ago, Jason Madison was alone in his home, which doubled as a shrimp shop window in Keaton Beach. As the wind began to roar and the bay began to shake, Madison decided to flee. It was the right decision. When he returned home the next morning, he found that the nearly 20-foot storm surge had destroyed it. Dead fish and broken furniture littered the landscape. Almost everything in the building was lost, taking with it the cornerstone of his livelihood.

“I had five tanks down there that I stored shrimp in, because we sell everything that was live, but that’s all gone now,” said Madison, a commercial bait and shrimp farmer for 23 years. . He stopped to examine the scattered debris. “Well, the pieces are here.” All that Helene has left behind is a waterlogged shell of what once was. He doesn’t know how, or even if, he will rebuild.

Stories like this are happening all over the Southeast. The storm struck six states, causing billions of dollars in losses to crops, livestock and aquaculture. Just 13 days later, Milton crossed Florida, leaving millions without power and hampering ports, animal feeding facilities and fertilizer plants along the state’s west coast.

Preliminary estimates suggest that Helene, one of the nation’s deadliest and costliest hurricanes since Katrina in 2005, upended hundreds of thousands of businesses across the Southeast and devastated much of the country’s agricultural operations. of the region. Milton’s impact has been more limited, but both disasters are expected to reduce supplies of feed and fertilizer and increase production costs, which could drive up prices for products like chicken and fruit within months and the years to come.

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, orchard, ranch or other agricultural operation is damaged during a disaster, it often results in a drop in production or even a sudden halt. This slowdown inevitably impacts companies that sell products such as seeds, fertilizers and equipment. Even growers and producers who manage to continue – or who have not been directly affected – may find that damage to roads and other critical infrastructure hampers the ability to get their products to market.

Early reports indicate this is already happening. Downed trees, flooded roads and clogged highways disrupted major transportation routes across the Southeast, while ports across the region suspended operations due to the storms, worsening a slowdown following a workers’ strike. dockworkers along the Gulf and East Coast.

Hélène dismantled farms that served as pillars of the country’s food supply chain. Cataclysmic winds destroyed hundreds of chicken coops in Georgia and North Carolina, which account 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 Helene-affected region produced some $6.3 billion in poultry products in 2022, with more than 80% coming from the most severely affected regions of the two states. In Florida, the storm flattened about one in seven poultry houses, as the Farm Bureau noted, compounding losses throughout the region that “will not only reduce the immediate supply of poultry, but also hamper local production capacity for months, even years.

The storm uprooted groves, 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 Florida, one of the nation’s top producers of oranges, peppers, sugar and orchids, have also reported steep production losses, facing an uncertain future. The rains and flooding triggered by Helen have hampered livestock operations in all affected states, with the situation in western North Carolina so dire that local agricultural authorities are crowdfunding feed and other supplies to help ranchers who lost their hay due to rising waters. Those who work at sea have also been affected; Clam farmers along the Gulf Coast are grappling with the losses they suffered when Helen’s storm surge ravaged their stocks.

In total, Helene-affected counties produce about $14.8 billion in crops and livestock each year, with Georgia and Florida accounting for more than half of that. If even a third of that production was lost to the two hurricanes, the loss could reach nearly $5 billion, according to the Farm Bureau.

Preliminary estimates from the Department of Agriculture suggest the one-two punch could result in more than $7 billion in crop insurance payouts. On October 15, the USDA announced that it has allocated $233 million in payments to producers so far.

As serious as it is, the situation could have been worse, both for consumers and for the country’s farmers. Florida is home to the highest concentration of fertilizer manufacturing plants in the country. Twenty-two of the state’s 25 phosphate waste piles, several of which belong to the Mosaic Industrial Plant (MOS), were in Milton’s path. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, halted operations ahead of the storm and has since said it suffered “limited damage” to its factories and warehouses. (But the Tampa Bay Times reported that one facility struggled with water intrusion after Helen and flooded during Milton, likely sending water polluted by phosphate waste flowing into Tampa Bay.) The storm also disrupted operations for several days at Port Tampa Bay, which handles about a quarter of the nation’s fertilizer exports.

The production impacts of the two hurricanes could be felt most acutely by the Sunshine State’s struggling citrus industry, which has long struggled with disease and destructive hurricanes. Any additional losses could further inflate the costs of products like orange juice, which have reached record levels this year, according to Lee, the agricultural economist. “Faced with shocks from hurricanes, agricultural production in southern states, such as Florida, will be impacted,” he said.

But determining 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 high food prices that followed this storm in 2022, the cost pressure from the hurricane compounded other factors, including conflict world, droughts in grain regions and the avian flu epidemic which decimated poultry farming. sector.

Even so, it is still possible that continued disruptions at ports and trucking routes could lead to “additional pressure on the entire food supply chain due to rising prices” associated with transporting these goods, Lee said. If this turns out to be the case, “eventually, when you go to the supermarket, you will end up finding more expensive products, overall.”

One of the biggest unknowns remains the question of how many storm-weary farms will simply shut down. Industrial-scale businesses will surely bounce back, but the rapid succession of devastating hurricanes may well discourage family farms and small producers from rebuilding, abandoning their livelihoods in favor of less vulnerable businesses.

“This is what we call a complex disaster. You’re still dealing with the effects of a 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 assessment of agricultural losses after disasters. “We found after Hurricane Idalia that some companies just decided to get out of business and do something else because they were hit so hard.”

Madison doesn’t know what’s next for her shrimp operation. He’s too focused on salvaging what he can to think that far ahead. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” he said. He hasn’t been able to afford flood insurance, so he’s not sure how much financial support he’ll get to help him rebuild, even though he’s still recovering from Hurricane Idalia, which hit the area from Big Bend, Florida in August. “The last few years, it’s just things are going down and times are getting tough… it’s like, what can you do?”

As the planet continues to warm, more farmers may find themselves facing the same question.

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story.

This article was originally published in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/helene-and-milton-upended-a-key-part-of-the-nations-food-supply/ . Grist is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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