Uvalda, GA |

In Montgomery County, the aftermath of Hurricane Helene is still being felt more than a year later, particularly in older pecan orchards that bore the brunt of the storm’s wrath. For growers here, the damage extends far beyond just a single harvest.

“The trees under the age of ten years old were pretty much spared, but we lost orchards like this and older were just major, significant damage,” says Andrew Sawyer, Southeast Area Pecan Agent. “Probably our greatest loss, as you see, the loss of the tree is your future income loss. So you have the crop loss of that year of 2024, but you really had the long term effects, the future income loss, which is if that tree was still there, what would it make?”

Despite the initial setback, growers remained optimistic early in the season. This spring and summer brought a glimmer of hope, as trees produced more flowers and nuts than expected. But that promise came with challenges of its own. Persistent rains during the same period created ideal conditions for one of the industry’s most costly diseases—pecan scab.

“We had so much rain through June and July. It wasn’t, it, it became a situation of, you know, we need to not necessarily maintain that scab. We could not get the fungicide on the tree long enough that the rain wouldn’t wash it off. We had a frequency of rainfall. It’s almost worse than the amount of rain in terms of disease, that period of leaf wetness, when that leaf just stays wet. It’s wet at night from the dew, and in the daytime you get a, if you get a rain at one o’clock, you’re potentially staying wet for a long time. That disease just continues,” says Sawyer.

Just as growers were grappling with the disease, the weather pattern flipped. By late August, rainfall had vanished across the state, placing tremendous stress on orchards without functioning irrigation systems.

“We’ve now been even at this location, fourteen weeks without reasonable rainfall. The whole state is just been without rain this fall, and an orchard that had to go without irrigation, you had that promise of a crop. Those tree, those feeder roots are growing straight to the surface to get that water. And once that rain shuts off, the feeder roots die back on a tree,” says Sawyer.

With hurricane damage, aggressive scab outbreaks, and a record-breaking drought all converging in the same season, the toll on the 2024 crop has only grown over time. As the harvest season nears its end, the overall yield continues to shrink.

“What wasn’t the best crop has just gotten shorter as it’s gone and it’s the weight. Your wagons, which weigh a certain amount in a normal year, that same wagon just doesn’t have the volume there. And again, now that we’re this far, we can see, the 2025 effects of scab. But this drought probably just as significant, and now you add in hurricane stress from the roots, everything,” says Sawyer.

By: John Holcomb