Hurricane Michael left a snowy landscape of ruined white cotton on Georgia’s red clay, destroying a crop and likely bringing hard times to the region’s many small communities built on agriculture.
When the storm struck, most of the cotton was still in the fields, “wide open and susceptible to the wind,” said farmer Ron Lee of McCleskey Cotton Co. in hard-hit southwest Georgia.
“Everything was just ready to harvest, so it couldn’t have been a worse time,” Lee said.
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