Fall is winding down and a south Texas ag legend is preparing for the winter. He fears a freeze will make things even harder for farmers who have already had a tough year, but he has a plan to get through it.
For Rodriquezville Farms, and other farms across Texas and the U.S., the year has been a nightmare come true, and it started out so well.
“You saw the crops, how they went. Everything would look beautiful,” George Rodriguez states. “At the end, everything went the wrong way.”
Though he has seen reports that the weather will be favorable this season, Rodriguez tells us he does not know what to expect in the winter. He hopes it goes well, but he wonders if south Texas is in for another freeze like it had back in the 1980s.
“We’re getting ready. What’s the Lord going to bring us, is it going to be like in 1983 when we had that frost, it was heavy, and it broke palm trees-- ruined trees and everything,” he notes. “We cannot predict what’s coming up front.”
This year, he has a new toy. A tractor that he is using for hay. That is all he is farming this season. He has been through enough in a year of pandemic, hurricanes, and political shifts. He is hesitant to try something risky.
“I see big farmers that are going downhill,” he adds. “They plant a lot of vegetables. They plant-- onions are very good. They plant them early, but they get frost too. They get a frostbite.”
For now, Rodriguez is ready to just chalk this one up and move on: “I’m hoping for the best... we still got winter, we still got the cold, the coronavirus and a lot of the sicknesses out there. Hope that we can cross it and have a better year for 2021.”
He says that he knows other farmers strongly agree with him.
