Tag Archives: harvest

Watermelon Harvest Underway in Crisp County After a Rollercoaster 2026 Growing Season

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Cordele, GA |

Down in Crisp County — also known as watermelon country — crews are busy in the fields harvesting fresh melons that will be supplying stores across Georgia and the country. Getting to this point, however, was no easy task, as the 2026 growing season proved to be a rollercoaster ride for producers.

“This year’s growing season started out with severe drought and warm days — watermelons really took off. Then we slowed down with some cooler days, still dry. And then all of a sudden, all the rain just came at one time,” said Jacob Jackson of Jackson Farms. “It’s been tough. Real sporadic weather altogether. Seen it all.”

THE DROUGHT WASN’T THE PROBLEM — THE DOWNPOUR WAS

For Jackson, the prolonged dry stretch actually wasn’t the worst part for his melons. With drip irrigation running through his fields, he was able to manage the lack of rain. The real damage came when the dry stretch broke all at once.

“As far as the drought, we can water these melons — I have all these watermelons on drip right here. Disease pressure is non-existent, everything goes very smoothly. Obviously input costs with irrigating go up, but what we don’t need is a watermelon to go through a whole dry stage and then all of a sudden get hit with ten inches of rain at one time,” Jackson said. “It’s just not prepared for that. It can bring the vines down, disease pressure can hit you — wet feet especially. A watermelon doesn’t need that much water. It just drowns out at that point.”

HARVEST SEASON: SMOOTH, BUT NOT SIMPLE

After a tough growing season, harvest has been fairly smooth — though it came with its own set of challenges once the rains finally arrived mid-season.

“Harvest season has been going pretty smooth. Obviously when the rain came, it made it tough dragging buses left and right, really rutting up fields, making a mess,” Jackson said. “But then it finally dried off and we’ve had a smooth go lately. The main thing about the heat is that as soon as it warms up after a big rain like that, the vines just want to melt and everything tries to get ripe at one time. Then it’s go, go, go — you have no choice but to put buses in the field and get your product out.”

THE SKILL BEHIND EVERY MELON

Getting that product out of the field, though, is no small task. Harvesting watermelons is done entirely by hand and depends on a workforce that truly knows what they’re doing.

“Watermelons are always going to be labor intensive — there’s no way around it. When you go into a watermelon field, you hope to get about three to four cuttings per field. You’ve got two crews: cutters and loaders,” Jackson said. “The cutters are really the most important contributors to this farm, because they determine what good quality goes into each and every bin that gets sold to consumers. Training a cutter — they’ve just got a knack for it. They know what they’re looking for. They can see a watermelon and know it’s ripe.”

For Crisp County’s watermelon producers, 2026 has been a season that tested just about everything — but as the bins fill and the trucks roll out, the harvest is proof that Georgia’s watermelon country knows how to weather the storm.

By: John Holcomb

Southwest Georgia Sweet Corn Harvest in Full Swing Despite Frost and Rising Costs

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Brinson, GA |

Southwest Georgia is home to more than eighty percent of the state’s sweet corn production — and right now, those fields are turning gold. Despite a late freeze putting a small dent in early yields, harvest is in full swing and growers say the crop has largely recovered.

“So far, it’s a really good crop. We had a little bit of frost damage at the beginning, but it’s straightened out and is really yielding well,” said Glenn Heard, a Decatur County sweet corn grower. “We have a good climate for sweet corn, and we can ship it all over the country.”

INSECTS DRIVE UP THE COST

While the warm climate and fertile soil make Southwest Georgia ideal for sweet corn production, disease pressure and pests are a constant concern — and one that makes this crop considerably more expensive to produce than field corn.

“By virtue mostly of insects, it is hard. We have to control them the best we can, and we put a lot more inputs into sweet corn because of the insect side compared to field corn,” Heard said.

Those costs have climbed even higher this year, with energy prices jumping nearly twenty percent since February. For growers in South Georgia’s sandy soils, fertilizer is already a significant expense — and the recent price increases have made a tough situation tougher.

“With our sandy land in South Georgia, we use a lot of fertilizer — probably more than anywhere else. So the fertilizer was certainly a shock, and so was the fuel. We’re just trying to muddle through it the best we can,” Heard said.

SOME RELIEF ON LABOR COSTS

Not all the news on the cost front has been bad, however. Recent changes to the H-2A worker visa program have provided some relief on one of the farm’s biggest line items — labor.

“We use a lot of H-2A in harvesting, some in the shed, and now some on our tractors and equipment. We were getting strangled by increases every year in the prevailing wage rate — and that has stopped. That has helped a lot,” Heard said.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Unlike field corn, which primarily goes into livestock feed, sweet corn is grown specifically for people to eat — and that distinction makes timing absolutely critical. The window between peak flavor and spoilage is narrow, and every step of the harvest process has to move quickly.

“We hand harvest — pretty much all the sweet corn in our area is hand harvested. We have to keep it really cool and ship it real soon because it has a certain shelf life. We have to get it to the consumer on time,” Heard said.

For Southwest Georgia’s sweet corn growers, this season is shaping up to be a solid one — even if getting there has required navigating higher costs, pest pressure, and an early frost that tested their resilience before the first ear was ever picked.

By: Damon Jones