Georgia farmers are those in the Southeast, hit hard by Hurricane Michael. The storm was a category 3 storm when it hit the state and damage to the Georgia agriculture industry is estimated at $2.4 billion. Jeffrey Dorfman is a professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at UGA. And it’s not just farmers who are suffering.
“And on top of that, we’ve now estimated another $360 million in losses to business who buy those farm products and process them,” according to Dorfman.
He says farmers are facing a difficult deadline.
“Most Georgia farmers have an annual production loan that they use to buy their inputs, pay their workers, run their equipment and then they pay it back when they harvest their crop and they sell it.”
Unfortunately, he says Michael hit at a time when many crops were ready for harvesting.
“Those production loans are all going to come due in January and some possibly February; which means we don’t have very long to get them disaster relief payments or to get instructions from the bank regulators to the banks about what sort of extensions they can extend to the farmers without getting into trouble from the regulators from having a bunch of things that look like bad loans in their books.”
Dorfman says Georgia leaders will address what the state can do during a special session of the General Assembly set to convene on November 13. He says assistance from Congress is also needed and authorities must act within the next six weeks to benefit farmers.
