Poultry growers lost 4 million chickens and turkeys due to Hurricane Florence and crop losses will run in the billions of dollars, said Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, on Tuesday. Wooten’s poultry figure was higher than the only estimate by state officials, made a week ago, of 3.4 million birds killed by the storm, along with 5,500 hogs.
“It is going to be billions of dollars of crop damage here in North Carolina,” said Wooten on the “Adams on Agriculture” program. “Our cotton crop is in far worse” condition since the hurricane, newly harvested sweet potatoes “are already rotting” and tobacco still in the field is not worth the trouble of harvesting, said Wooten. In some areas, flood waters are 4 to 5 feet deeper than in Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the local benchmark for a severe hurricane.
The state Department of Environmental Quality said 41 manure lagoons were flooded or overflowing as of Tuesday morning, unchanged from the weekend. In addition, 56 lagoons were in danger of overflowing, one less than on Sunday.