Hurricane Milton, the fourth hurricane to slam Florida agriculture in 14 months, damaged citrus and other specialty crops, knocked out power to some dairy farms, and also struck a sizable portion of U.S. phosphate infrastructure.
About 62% of phosphate produced in the U.S. comes from Florida. Josh Linville, vice president of fertilizer at StoneX, estimates phosphate facilities that produce about 61,500 tons daily were in the direct path of Milton in central Florida.
“They built these facilities to withstand storms, but they can only control what they build,” he told Agri-Pulse. “What they can't control is things like the electrical grid, like water supplies, like the workers being able to make it to work. Those are the tangents that really start to affect them on a longer-term scale.”
For the citrus industry, Milton's damage comes on the top of production challenges from invasive citrus greening disease that has been plaguing growers for 20 years.
“When you combine pest and disease pressures with these hurricanes, every time we start to kind of get our groove back, it feels like we're knocked back on our heels,” said Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest citrus grower organization.
“We've seen our our production levels drop by over 90% in the last two decades between greening and hurricanes and freezes, and so it's been discouraging for the Florida grower, no doubt about it,” he added.
In past storms, orchards have been damaged by standing water. In Milton's case, the high winds knocked large amounts of fruit from trees.
Specialty crops such as tomatoes and strawberries, as well as field and row crops in northern Florida, were also widely affected. Dairy farmers were affected by power outages that interrupted milking.
The Florida Farm Bureau is encouraging farmers and ranchers to complete a Hurricane Milton disaster assessment survey led by the University of Florida Extension after the storm. The confidential survey will help estimate production losses so state and federal agencies can make informed decisions related to disaster response and relief.
As for the hit to phosphate production, Linville still does not have official damage estimates, but he said Milton was "as bad as it gets for the Tampa region and local phosphate production facilities."
"Fortunately for the phosphate market," he added, "a last-minute shift south appears to have saved the worst."
U.S. phosphate production. (Map: Josh Linville, StoneX)The storm comes at a time when fertilizer year 2024 ended with “very low” inventory levels and challenges for the fertilizer sector due to global demand."China, historically the world’s largest DAP/MAP exporter, continues to see export volumes falling behind normal. India, historically the world’s largest importer of phosphate, continues to work to rebuild stockpiles for domestic use," Linville said. "The world’s biggest supplier is scaling back while the biggest demand is catching up."
Widespread fall phosphate application is less than 30 days away, and phosphate prices have jumped as a result of the storm from the mid-$550’s toward the end of September to values nearer to $580, Linville said Tuesday.
Most of the crop damage from Milton last week was caused by winds and flooding, which compounded the destruction from Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier, according to Christa Court, director of the economic impact analysis program at the University of Florida.
While Court does not have a damage assessment from Hurricane Milton, she told Agri-Pulse her team has been in touch with state and federal officials who are “asking for information that we have for decisions that they may need to be making, but they're not going into specifics about what those decisions might be.”
“We're at the point where we are analyzing the data and probably ready to release in the next week or two for Hurricane Helene, and we have to finish that assessment so that we can adjust our baseline to account for the compound nature of Debbie and Helene as we go into the assessment of Milton,” Court said.
Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., and Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., along with Georgia’s entire congressional delegation, led a letter on Oct. 1 following Hurricane Helene’s landfall pushing for disaster relief funding to prevent deep and lasting economic damage to agriculture in the southeastern United States.
President Biden and some lawmakers have asked congressional leaders to return before the Nov. 5 election to consider a disaster aid funding package. House Speaker Mike Johnson has described the calls as “premature,” saying that Congress can consider disaster aid after returning to Washington for a scheduled session.
Bart Fischer, a former House Agriculture Committee economist who now serves as co-director for the Agricultural and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M, says he’s hearing $20 billion is the range for a new ad hoc disaster package. However, that could change depending on whether it covers losses for both 2023 and 2024.
Bart Fischer, Texas A&M“Not to sound crass, but nothing motivates Congress like a disaster,” Fischer told participants at the North Carolina Chamber's Ag Allies Conference recently about what to expect over the next few months in Congress.
“They're going to come back from the election and be motivated to get something done,” he added.
Crop insurance won't be sufficient to protect producers from significant financial losses, he said. With lower commodity prices for crops like cotton, some growers might not have purchased higher levels of coverage.
“Crop insurance is incredibly important, but if you're insuring well below your cost of production, that's not going to keep you in business."
Joyner said although crop insurance can be helpful to producers, repeated damage in the case of multiple storms over a relatively short amount of time leads to many costs being absorbed by growers.
“Obviously, crop insurance will help in many instances. But when you look at the two to three-year effect of these trees being rehabilitated, we know from past storms that our production is going to be down by 20, 25, 30% year over year for the next several years until these trees recover from the beating that they just took, and crop insurance does not factor in the loss of production and the expense of rehabilitating these trees over the next few seasons."
“It's going to be those costs absorbed by the grower, and that's difficult,” Joyner added.
Fischer said there is pressure on Congress to pass a disaster assistance package that may sidestep USDA delivery and go directly to states in the form of block grants.
“I won’t be surprised if we start to see legislation that’s a little more prescriptive and vastly simplified,” he said.
In Florida, Ag Commissioner Wilton Simpson announced an interest-free loan program Tuesday that will allow eligible agriculture and aquaculture producers to restore, repair or replace essential physical property, remove vegetative debris and cover the cost of associated labor in recovering from Hurricane Milton.
“Delivering immediate support to these agricultural producers is a critical first step to get them back on their feet in the wake of back-to-back disasters,” Simpson said. “Through the department’s Disaster Recovery Loan Program, we’re offering immediate and effective financial relief to bridge the gap until federal or other resources are accessible."
USDA's October citrus forecast, released Oct. 11, less than two days after Milton made landfall in Florida’s citrus belt, estimated Florida would produce 15 million boxes of oranges this season, 1.4 million boxes of grapefruit and 200,000 boxes of tangerines and tangelos.
The forecast for orange production is nearly 3 million boxes less than the total production of Florida citrus during the 2023-2024 harvest season, without taking into account the damages sustained from Hurricane Milton.
“We've seen our our production levels drop by over 90% in the last two decades between greening and hurricanes and freezes, and so it's been discouraging for the Florida grower,” Joyner said.
“But look,” he added. “We're going to replant and rebuild and recover.”
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