Jeff Pittman began harvesting his peanut crop in late September. Fourteen days later, Hurricane Helene barreled into Florida’s Big Bend, bringing 6 to 10 inches of rain to his fields.
For peanut farmers, harvest season has always been hurricane season. But more intense storms and rising costs are making it harder for producers to recover. Helene is the third hurricane to hit the area in 13 months. Hurricanes Idalia in August 2023 and Debby in August 2024 caused between $113 million to $147 million in row crop losses (including peanuts, hay and sugarcane, among other crops) in Florida.
On the Wednesday before Helene’s strike, peanut farms were a flurry of activity. Owners, workers and anyone willing to get their hands dirty scrambled to pick up fuel, tie down machinery and set up generators.
It was the type of day when calls went straight to voicemail. When farmers answered, it was only to say, breathlessly, “we’re really busy,” and get back to the fields.
By Thursday afternoon, nearly all of Florida west of I-75 was under a hurricane warning. Helene’s wind speeds intensified rapidly, boosting its classification from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurricane in 64 hours. “We’re taking everything really very serious,” said Pittman during a 3 p.m. phone call.
By 11:30 p.m., it was clear why.
Hurricane Helene made landfall 10 miles west of Perry with winds of up to 140 mph. Grain bins crumpled like tin cans. Miles of fencing flattened.
By Friday morning, “people are just saying it’s real bad,” said Laura Fowler Goss, executive director at the Florida Peanut Federation, “worse than Idalia.”
Harvest day rain delays
Florida is the nation’s third-largest peanut producer. The state harvested 554 million pounds of peanuts in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More than half of the harvested crop is turned into peanut butter; the rest is used as oil, flour, biodiesel or boiled and roasted snacks.
The state’s sandy soils and warm temperatures are the legume’s ideal growing conditions. Florida’s The state’s sandy soils and warm temperatures are the legume’s ideal growing conditions. Florida’s hurricanes? Not so much.
Peanuts are usually planted in the spring and take 140 to 150 days to mature. Their oval leaves and yellow flowers sprawl out above the ground while underground “pegs” lead growth of 40 or so distinctively hatched peanut pods.
The plants need about one inch of water each week, but can’t take too much more. This year, excessive springtime rain in Georgia and Florida forced some growers to replant around 10% of their crop.
Strong wind and heavy rain during harvest season can be even more damaging.
“This is really bad timing for us and the majority of my community and area,” Pittman said. “What happens with this type of tropical weather at this stage, it really deteriorates the health of the plant. And when the plant itself starts deteriorating, of course, you start losing the peanuts in the ground.”
That problem intensifies as wet soils delay harvests. Pittman started his harvest two weeks ago, but rain delays kept him out of the field for four days. He estimates Hurricane Helene will delay his harvest another six days. “That really puts you in a tough position, a very challenging position, in regards to maintaining the appropriate harvest schedule.”
Saturated soil clings to the peanuts, trapping them in the ground. “If they're ready to dig and the wet weather delays it, then the peanuts can start rotting off in the soil, and you're not going to recover them,” said Kirk Brock, a farmer in Jefferson County, just 40 miles northwest of where Helene made landfall.
Brock hadn’t yet harvested when the storm hit.
“We’re not worried about it yet,” he said, “but in 10 days I will be.”
A week’s delay in digging peanuts can decrease yields by 100 pounds per acre, according to a 2021 University of Florida study.
To make matters worse, “wet soil promotes fungal growth,” said Shivendra Kumar, a UF plant scientist and extension agent specializing in peanut disease. Fungal spores hitch a ride on hurricane winds, quickly spreading between fields.
Fungi thrive in hot, humid post-storm conditions, releasing toxic compounds called aflatoxins. Peanuts with high levels of these chemicals don’t make it to market. In 2019, nearly 30% of peanuts didn’t meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s aflatoxin limits for edible peanuts.
No break for recovery
“I feel like [in Jefferson County], if you look at the historical tracks of hurricanes, I've been pretty fortunate, but it seems like we're trying to catch up lately,” said Brock.
In the past eight years, five hurricanes have hit the Big Bend. Only three have hit anywhere else in Florida.
Rising sea surface temperatures, higher sea levels and other impacts of climate change may be making major hurricanes more likely. The Big Bend’s shallow continental shelf leaves water with no place to go but inland, worsening storm surge and its coastal impacts.
In 2018, Hurricane Michael caused nearly $23 million in peanut losses in Florida. “It was a catastrophic event for us on our farm and most of our neighbors,” Pittman said. He lost a peanut mill – the machine that grinds peanuts into a paste – and nearly 27 - 30 center pivots used to irrigate fields, each costing $40,000 to $150,000. His peanut yield fell by one ton (valued around $550) of peanuts per acre.
While it is too soon to quantify losses from the latest hurricane, Goss from the Florida Peanut Federation said that the compounding impacts of Idalia, Debby and Helene are overwhelming.
“One farmer in Lafayette County finished his equipment storage barn rebuild (from Idalia) in July 2024, Debby took some of the roofing panels and Helene toppled the entire barn,” she said in an email. “When asked what I could do to help him, his reply was ‘drinks and tissues.’”
Two peanut buying points in north central Florida, where crops are trucked to be graded, dried and stored, were severely damaged. One will take at least a week to resume operations. The other could take months.
“That really causes a strain on the whole system,” she said. Farmers will have to transport what peanuts they can salvage to South Florida or Georgia for processing, an additional cost and delay.
While crop insurance and emergency assistance programs (including the Recovery Loan Program that Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson launched Friday after Helene) are available to help farmers recover, both Pittman and Goss say it’s too little, too slow.
The process of documenting, applying and receiving federal and state aid can take years.
“What we found after Idalia was that it was so overwhelming for some of the folks that they said: ‘I can’t wait to be inspected, evaluated and appraised. I have to fix this so that I can keep going,’” Goss said. “But now they don’t have the cash flow to do that.”
Pittman emphasized that the hurricane hit an industry already struggling with labor shortages, rising costs and low market rates.
“This couldn’t be at a worse time. It's just about impossible to be profitable right now, especially when you have these types of weather events,” he said.
Cotton, soybean, tomato, squash, corn and poultry farmers across the state reported similarly devastating losses.
“Worry about local farms surviving this third blow is very real,” Goss said. “The struggle is unfathomable, mental health is a very real concern, and the future of agriculture in this area of Florida is bleak.”
