Texas farmers and ranchers are slow to recover after Hurricane Harvey, which hit the state's cotton crops the hardest, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
"It went from a year where we thought we were going to make a really good income to just kind of hoping to scratch out a living and pay our bills," Carey Orsak tells 1200 WOAI.
He sits on about two-thousand acres near Bay City, which was rocked by the storm. Most of his cotton had been harvested, but was sitting in the field. The high winds blew it apart and rain ruined what had been scattered.
It's estimated that between 400,000 and 600,000 bales of hay were affected by the storm. With each bale being 500 pounds, Dr. Joshua McGinty at the Texas AgriLife extension office says that's between five and eight percent of the Texas crop.
"It's tremendous. Texas makes more cotton than anyone else in the country so, that large a percentage is huge," he explains. "That's larger than some other's state's total production."
He's a cotton farmer, too, and faces huge losses. Where the eyewall came through, most cotton was harvested, but it was being stored in compressed rectangles in the fields. Up the coast, those crops were not harvested, and when lint and seed exposed, he says it's ruined. The seed is useless, even for animal feed.
McGinty says, the problem is, this was expected to be a bumper crop.
"Even though prices are not great, we make such a big crop you can overcome that with pounds per acre. Some people lost all of that in the storm."