One emergency after another, yet the ag community in the “Lone Star State” keeps fighting back.
If you are keeping score here, since last March -- Texas farmers have had to cope with a pandemic, drought, a hurricane, flooding, a freeze, empty shelves in supermarkets, and gas lines.
“What else can we get right? I mean we’ve been through it all in the last year,” Omar Montemayor with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension states.
Some of the loss is unknown. Regardless, the people of the state always work their way through it and make a comeback. Because “you don’t mess with Texas.”
“I think we’re going to bounce back. The cattle prices are going to bounce back. We’ve lost probably about 10 percent of the growers that did plant earlier in the year, in February. Of course, they lost all their crops, but the other 90 percent are still in the process of planting and they probably will make a crop if we can get some spring rains later on,” Montemayor states.
The Texas ag community has had to cope with a lot and certainly does not need any more trouble.
“Just to kind of give you an idea of what we’ve experienced this past week when we had the freeze, going into this freeze a lot of cattle were already weak from the drought that we’ve experienced,” he states. “So, we did experience some cattle losses in the area. Some of these week or older calves, some of the ranchers did lose that. So, the industry as a whole is weakened.”
Now you may also remember a story we did last year about my son’s garden. Well, sadly, his basil plant was destroyed during last week’s freeze. Well, symbolically, we’re planting new basil seeds in the same spot. He learns a valuable lesson that if something like this is destroyed, it can always grow back better!