Freezing temperatures and ice of the past weekend have impacted industries from timber to sugar cane, crawfish to cattle. 

Agriculture is at the mercy of the weather gods. And even though it’s winter — between harvest and planting season — for a lot of crops in the south, the record cold and ice still left a mark on some of the local agricultural sectors.

In Mississippi, rain quickly turned into ice in many parts of the state, freezing powerlines and trees, delivering a blow to the state’s timber industry, according to Keith Coble, a professor agricultural economics at Mississippi State University.

“What tends to happen with pine trees is that when they get bent over with ice, they may break off, or they may pull out of the ground, and it leads to a tree that's probably not salvageable,” he said.

And you can’t just replace a 12-year-old tree. “You've lost 12 years’ worth of growth, and all you can do is clean it up and start over.”

In neighboring Louisiana, Mike Deliberto, an associate professor at Louisiana State University, said that even though farmers just wrapped up sugar cane harvest, “they’re very much concerned really by the prolonged days we're going to have temperatures really below freezing or even below the 20s.”

Because you can harvest sugar cane several times, but not if the root freezes beyond repair.

“Really, the underground portion of that root is really critical to next year's crop establishment,” he said.

Moving west through Louisiana into Texas, we’re in crawfish country. Nikki Fitzgerald with Texas A&M is keeping an eye on the mudbugs, who burrow deep in the ground when it gets cold.

“It just slows down production or halts it just for a few days, just briefly, but it does not overall hurt the season,” she said.

The cold weather might actually have a positive effect on what was already looking to be a decent season for crawfish.

“Every time you get these cold snaps, they actually will molt, which is a good thing, because when they molt, they actually grow two times the size they were before,” Fitzgerald said.

But cattle cannot burrow into the ground. That’s why during cold snaps, cows — unlike crawfish — get smaller, said economist David Anderson with Texas A&M. They’re eating food to stay warm, not to add weight.

“So what we typically see following a storm like this is weights come down,” he said. And that can bring down beef production.

Anderson added that this storm also hit a lot of poultry-producing regions of the country — not just Texas. “They have heaters in the chicken houses, but it costs them a lot of money to keep those chickens warm,” he said.

It’s an extra expense that can hurt a farmer's bottom line.

Source - https://www.marketplace.org