NUECES AND SAN PATRICIO COUNTIES –
One group that kept a close eye on Harvey was our area farmers.
That was especially true when it came to the local cotton crop.
There’s no doubt about it, here in south Texas, agriculture is an integral part of our economy, and every year around harvest season, tropical weather becomes a concern, but this year most area farmers got lucky.
Sid Brough, manager of edcot gin says, “this was the best cotton crop I’d ever seen. I believe the cotton crop is going to average 2 and 3 quarter bales to the acre.”
Here in the coastal bend, 95 percent of our cotton has already been harvested and was unaffected by Harvey.
However, Sid says farmers further north were not so lucky, “If you go up the coast towards Houston, a lot of it hasn’t been harvested and its still on the stalk and I feel sure a lot of that is going to be damaged considerably.”
San Patricio county cotton farmer Bobby Nedbalek shows a different story; “This is an example of a bad place to store cotton. The good place to get cotton is in one of those round bales that has the plastic wrap on it.”
Even though most of the coastal bend cotton crop was harvested before Harvey hit, some of the grain elevators were damaged heavily in the storm, Bobby says they’ll get through it; “We’re all holding hands and helping each other and hoping that we can get the most out of our farming operation”.
Source: www.kristv.com