Crop losses from Helene could trigger $7 billion in insurance payouts
by Ryan Hanrahan University of Illinois's FarmDoc project
On Thursday, Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida as a devastating Category 4 hurricane before making its way through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee — with deep, disastrous impacts across agricultural sectors.
Bloomberg's Gerson Freitas Jr and Ilena Peng reported that "Hurricane Helene has halted chicken processing plants and caused severe damage to some flocks, while also downing pecan trees and flattening cotton crops, as floodwaters swamped the southern US."
In Georgia, thousands of pecan trees were blown over by hurricane winds.
Image Credit - GA Farm Bureau
"Every commodity was impacted, with cotton, pecans, poultry and timber the hardest hit, according to Matthew Agvest, communications director for the Georgia Department of Agriculture," Freitas Jr. and Peng reported. "While it's still early in the assessment stage, the state expects Helene to be more costly than Hurricane Michael in 2018, which caused $2.5 billion in agricultural damage."
Across the southern U.S., "the crop losses alone could trigger $7 billion in insurance payouts, a US Department of Agriculture official estimated Tuesday," reported Peng, Freitas Jr, Ari Natter, and Josh Saul.
The Associated Press' Stephen Smith, Kate Payne and Heather Hollingsworth reported that "Moody's Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather's preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion."
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