美国国家公共电台 NPR Another Storm Victim — Pecan Groves In Southwest Georgia

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Another Storm Victim — Pecan Groves² In Southwest Georgia

NOEL KING, HOST:

When Hurricane Michael plowed³ through southwest Georgia, it hit that area's farms like a bomb. Cotton fields near harvest were blown bare, and decades-old pecan groves were leveled. GPB's Grant Blankenship visited a pecan farm in southwest Georgia to see how the recovery is progressing.

GRANT BLANKENSHIP, BYLINE⁴: Tucked away in a corner of the Pine Knoll⁵ Pecan Grove¹ near the town of Pretoria, Ga., is one of those things that Mitch Bulger says makes living and working here worth it.

MITCH BULGER: I promise you, you stick your finger in that, that's the coldest water. There goes a duck.

BLANKENSHIP: A flock of about half a dozen water birds fly through cypress⁶ trees bordering a bubbling, spring-fed pool. And yes, this summer swimming hole is, in fact, cold.

Oh, wow.

BULGER: (Laughter) A lot of fun back here.

BLANKENSHIP: Bulger's been the farm manager at Pine Knoll for 20 years. The family that owns the plantation⁷ is mostly scattered⁸ to Colorado and Rhode Island. But for Bulger, this is the only home his kids have ever known.

BULGER: This means everything to me.

BLANKENSHIP: Which is why the scene at our backs hurts so much. It's one of the thousands of the farm's pecan trees laid low by Hurricane Michael. And this one was a real moneymaker.

BULGER: One of the oldest varieties there is.

BLANKENSHIP: It's actually called a moneymaker?

BULGER: It's actually called a moneymaker. Here's the biggest one, Grant, this one right here.

BLANKENSHIP: Its ripped-up taproot is encased in red clay. And maybe 30 yards away, pecans are piled like gravel⁹ in a dry stream bed between enormous tree trunks. The nuts could still be gathered by hand, if only someone would do the work.

BULGER: I had a crew Monday, and now I don't have a crew. So... (Laughter). I paid them 25 cent, and they still didn't stay.

BLANKENSHIP: That's 25 cents a pound, and that works out to about $25 a day. In an average year, these nuts would have been headed to China - not this year, and not because of the weather, but because of the U.S.-China trade war. Now?

BULGER: I don't know that we can supply what our Americans will need.

BLANKENSHIP: There's still money to be made in a grove of far younger trees, though it didn't escape damage.

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BLANKENSHIP: Thousands of these trees must be cut down, too. Still, Bulger says the younger trees are the long-term future of the Pine Knoll plantation. But in the short term?

BULGER: We got those lean years coming ahead of us, and we'll - you know, we'll work around them.

BLANKENSHIP: Mitch Bulger says that means replanting and tending and waiting - for decades. Then he's hopeful he'll see the Pine Knoll Pecan Plantation thick with moneymakers again.

For NPR News, I'm Grant Blankenship in Pretoria, Ga.