Video courtesy Texas Farm Bureau
A new video from the Texas Farm Bureau provided a closer look at the damage wrought on Texas crops by Winter Storm Uri.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this. I mean, this wiped us out completely,” Uvalde vegetable grower Brandon Laffere of L&L Farms said in the video.
Laffere, Rio Grande Valley-based Mike Helle of Green Gold Farms, and Dale Murden of Texas Citrus Mutual shared about the heartbreaking losses to their crops as well.
“This deal was beautiful,” Helle said of his melon crop. “The crop was in the ground, it was starting to take off, and everything looked wonderful — like a picture. And then — it’s pretty tough to go through that,” he said of the long stretches below freezing that left his crop and others in ruins.
“You get knots in your stomach thinking ‘What happened, what could of happened, what could you have done.’ We did all we could.”
Murden said citrus crops spent over 53 hours under freezing temperatures.
“The fruit doesn’t like it much below 28. The trees don’t like it below 26,” he said in the video. “That night of the freeze I’d cut open fruit and it was ice inside.”
Total agricultural losses to the storm and freeze could be around $600 million, including losses in the livestock, dairy and horticulture sectors, according to the Texas Farm Bureau.
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