Harry Ott, president of the South Carolina Farm Bureau, saw Hurricane Helene’s fury firsthand on his farm. He estimates that South Carolina’s agriculture industry will lose millions of dollars during a year that’s already been hard on farmers.

“My farm was right at the beginning of where the storm came into South Carolina. We got probably about 12 inches of rain, and we had intermittent wind gusts of 60 to 80 miles an hour over a two-hour period of time.”

South Carolina’s crops suffered a lot of damage.

“I will tell you that the cotton crop probably sustained the worst damage. We were right at the beginning of the cotton harvest, which means that it all opened and was ready to be picked. That doesn’t bode well for wind and rain. For those that haven’t completed their corn harvest, that corn will be flat on the ground now, so it will not get harvested. We were beginning the peanut harvest. I think the peanuts that were already turned upside down, inverted, and ready for harvest will probably be okay. I’m a little concerned for the ones that had not been dug yet, the ground’s gonna be so wet, it’s gonna take a long time before we can get the equipment in to dig them, and the longer you leave them in after they mature, more of the nuts fall off in the ground when you’re trying to dig them up. So I can’t give you a number on how much damage, but it’s going to be damage to particularly, I would say, cotton and peanuts on the commodity side.”

The damage doesn’t end with crops.

“We’ve had reports of poultry houses being blown down. Lots of trees. A lot of trees were blown over. Fences, sheds, houses, a lot of damage. I can say that I know right now that Farm Bureau insurance has received over 2,100 claims. We expect that to go to probably 3,500. And we are expecting losses in the 70 to 75 million, and that’s just Farm Bureau Insurance. I have no idea how big that number’s gonna be but it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”