US: Pecan farmers see long-term damage from Gustav

Driving through his pecan orchard last week, Andre Bergeron, co-owner of Bergeron Pecan Co., couldn’t help but shake his head as he pointed out several large mounds of mangled timber throughout the 400-acre, family-owned property. A few months ago, those mounds were decades-old pecan trees, some of them standing more than 100-feet tall.

That was before Sept. 1, when Hurricane Gustav tore through the state. The storm hit farmers in Pointe Coupee Parish particularly hard, destroying trees that take between 12 and 15 years to fully mature. About 65 percent of the pecan trees in the southern part of the state sustained significant damage, while another 10 percent were lost, agriculture officials and research scientists said.

Miles Brashier, LSU Agricultural Center county agent for Pointe Coupee, West Baton Rouge and Iberville parishes, estimates that more than half of last fall’s pecan crop statewide was lost because of the storm. The hurricane came at the worst possible time: about 45 days before the annual fall harvest, when the pecans — still not fully mature — were hanging low on tree limbs and were easily blown off the branches by high winds, Bergeron said.

Because pecan trees take more than a decade to mature, pecan producers can’t expect to rebound one year after experiencing a catastrophic loss the way corn or soybean farmers can, Bergeron said. “This is going to hurt for a long time,” he said.
And it’s not just the reduced crop size that is hurting producers. The quality of those pecans that survived the storm was also affected, said Randy Sanderlin, a plant pathologist at the LSU Agriculture Center’s Pecan Research Station in Shreveport.

Because many branches that feed nutrients into the meat or filling of the nuts also were damaged by the high winds, the pecans that were salvaged were of lower quality than in years past, Sanderlin said. The reduction in crop size coupled with the loss in quality means pecan producers statewide can expect to see a significant loss in revenue, said Kurt Guidry, an extension economist with LSU’s Agriculture Center.

In Louisiana, where pecan producers generate an average of $12 million in revenue in a typical year, pecan producers are looking at a $9 million loss in revenue, Guidry said. The situation isn’t so dire in the central part of the state, especially in Natchitoches and Rapides parishes, where storm damage wasn’t as bad, said John Pyzner, a pecan and fruit specialist at the LSU Agricultural Center’s Pecan Research Station.

Source: 2theadvocate.com