Tuesdays twister not only caused damage to people’s homes and cars in Jackson County, it also tore up farms.

The start of the year is proving to be challenging for farmers.

“There is still a loss to the farm. losses we weren’t expecting,” said Jeffery Pittman, a Jackson County farmer. “We didn’t plan for it of course and it makes it a little harder to start of the year on this type of circumstances.”

The destructive storm damaged Jeffery Pittman’s necessary farm equipment.

“On our farm, we had 6 irrigation systems destroyed on the morning on the weather,” said Pittman.

Pittman says they have around 45 irrigation systems, but now they’re down a few.

“They’re twisted and thrown out of the path,” said Pittman.

To make matters worse, the price to replace the system has gone up since they bought them.

“Prior to hurricane Michael you could put a system up like this for about $45 a foot, a year after hurricane Michael it went up to $65 a foot and today this structure would cost $90 a foot,” said Pittman.

They’re going to take a hit with this loss.

“Directly affected on our farm, the value of the systems new are in the $350,000, we hope to be able to repair them,” said Pittman.

Luckily, they don’t need the water just yet.

“Right now, the demand on water is nonexistent,” said Pittman. we need water in about 100 days.”

But the time is ticking to get these systems back up and running, the crop season starts in March.

“We are just trying to make the repairs and get this behind us so we can start the crop year,” said Pittman.

They are getting over a hurdle so they can get back to growing the crops.

Source - https://www.wjhg.com