While Hurricane Harvey was a record-breaker that decimated parts of Texas, the latest damage report from Texas A&M was not as bad as some expected, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
School Economist Dr. Doug Steele says the storm caused more than $200 million in crop and livestock losses.
“The effects of Hurricane Harvey will linger for quite some time with our Texas farmers and ranchers,” he said. “Many South Texas or coastal area cotton farmers were on the verge of harvesting one of the best crops ever in Texas, while some ranchers were unable to save some cattle from insurmountable flood waters."
He says the cotton industry was hardest hit, suffering $100 million in damages. Cotton was on the stalk, ready to be harvested, or sitting in the field and damaged by wind, rain or flood water.
And while that sounds bad, Agrilife Extension Agronomist Josh McGinty says, it's not as bad as they predicted.
"We were guessing quite a bit higher initially," he tells News Radio 1200 WOAI.
He says more of the cotton that was in the fields was harvestable than they predicted. "Two-hundred thousand bails is nothing to sneeze at, but at the national scale, it's not all that large of a loss."
If you look at the loss for just one year, he says Hurricane Harvey was worse than the drought of 2011.
He says, in drought years, farmers don't invest much in their crops, knowing it's unlikely to have a high yield. This year, farmers were expecting a bumper crop, and pumped a lot of money into their fields, only to see it wiped out at the last minute.