North Carolina farmers state that the main part of their revenue this year was destroyed by Hurricane Irene. Even before the storm ended, farmers knew that Irene would affect tobacco and cotton the worst, but they couldn’t measure the loss until the harvest. With the end of tobacco harvest, state officials state the value of the crop this year constituted $114 million that is less than in 2010, though the number of acres planted this year was higher.

Mean yield per acre was 1,700 pounds of tobacco on this year’s crop in comparison to 2,100 acres last year. The harvest was worth approximately $589 million last year, according to estimates presented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.“Farming is quite difficult. You depend on so many things, which can’t be controlled. I can say that this crop year was a bad one,” stated Loren Fisher, professor of crop science at the N.C. State University.
Agriculture is the state’s main industry, producing $74 billion in economic affairs and allowing about 700,000 jobs, according to the Department of Agriculture. Farmers thought that their profit depends on the weather - drought one year, hurricanes in the others, unfortunately this year they faced both.

This year the tobacco harvest was the most affective by the sustained winds and Hurricane Irene. The tobacco plants were two to three weeks behind their usual growth because of the continuous dry of the early summer. The worse thing, is that the leaves that remained when the hurricane happened were the most valuable one the plant.

The rain and strong wind tore the leaves, making them already less valuable, and in some places, wet weather following the hurricane flooded the plants. In the majority of fields, the plants were destroyed. In some cased, Fisher said, plants can be stood back, but they have to be harvested by hand. There are about 1,500 tobacco manufacturing in the state, Fisher stated, with about 2,000 to 2,500 farmers relying for them for profit.

Walter Stalls says that Hurricane Irene will cost him approximately $400,000 on destroyed tobacco, and also $200,000 on the cotton that he grows near Robersonville in Martin County.“We did some amount of coverage,” Stalls said, referring to federal harvest insurance the majority of farmers buy in order to cover losses.

Stalls had big hopes for is cotton crop. Prices have been very good. “I was sitting on some 1,000-pound cotton before that awful storm. But the wind eradicated it,” Stall said. The storm beat down the plants, Stalls stated. As well as tobacco plants, they can sometimes recover, but at the season of harvest, the shaking from the mechanical picker often makes the cotton to fall on the ground.