Hurricane Laura had a substantial effect on the agriculture industry and Monroe pecan farmer Abraham Lincoln says his nuts were severely impacted. Lincoln says while there are still some nuts in the trees, there aren’t enough to make it beyond his local customers.
“We’ll have enough nuts to take care of our local market, but as far as our wholesale market, where we ship to big companies or overseas, we won’t have nuts for that,” said Lincoln.
The damage to the nuts is even more detrimental since this year appeared to be a promising harvest.
Lincoln says on a good year, his operation will move about 3 million pounds of nuts, but this year, he anticipates it will be closer to a quarter-million pounds.
“We’ve gone several years without a crop and we had a really good crop. Now we’ve got nuts laying on the ground,” said Lincoln.
Nuts that were knocked out of trees are not salvageable.
Lincoln says he invested extra care into the crop that would have been harvested by the first of October.
“We did a little more work that we would not normally do, we put in more fertilizer, just so we could make those nuts make that crop mature and here we have a lot of them laying on the ground. There’s still nuts on the trees, but there’s not what there was,” said Lincoln.
Louisiana isn’t the only state to see its pecan crops negatively impacted by hurricanes. Georgia is the nation’s largest pecan producer and they’ve been impacted by Hurricane Sally.
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