From all of us at Georgia Organics, we’d like to give a huge heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who supported our Farmer Fund relief campaigns in 2024. With your help, we raised over $74,250 in relief funding to go toward local farmers impacted by unexpected and devastating emergency events.
In August 2024, Tropical Storm Debby caused widespread and severe flooding in Georgia; just a month later, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the U.S. as a Category 4 hurricane, leaving even more widespread damage across the state and our neighbors, including North Carolina and Florida. After Helene, Georgia farmers suffered more than $5.5 billion in damages, impacting many of the small and organic farms Georgia Organics provides services for. Brendan Gannon of Gannon Organics was affected by both storms and shared: “Tropical Storm Debby, we didn’t get that much wind, but we got a ton of rain. And it flooded our fields and we lost a good portion of our crops. They just kind of rotted in the ground, stayed wet for a long time. So we lost maybe like, 30 or 40% of our crops, maybe more from that.
“And then, you know over a month later we had Helene. And it was just way windier than we expected. So usually when there’s a hurricane or tropical storm, I’ll take the plastic off our houses, the greenhouses and stuff. But it was saying it wasn’t gonna be that bad, but it kind of turned toward us as it approached Georgia and it tore apart two of our Caterpillar tunnels…everything inside of them died. All of our remaining crops got wind damage pretty bad.”
