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.”
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.”
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.”
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.