The timing could not have been worse for Ponchatoula strawberry farmer William Fletcher.
Fletcher spent the first part of August prepping his fields for planting. By the time he finished, the rows were neatly formed and fertilizer was in the ground.
“I remember thinking that I was really satisfied,” Fletcher, a former mortgage banker and a fifth-generation strawberry farmer, tells 225 in a feature from the current issue. “There wasn’t a clod of dirt or a blade of grass in the rows. The soil was so fine it was like dumping out a box of cake mix.”
Those conditions were perfect for planting. But they were disastrous for the August weather event no one saw coming, dumping as much as 31 inches of rain on some areas and overloading rivers and tributaries that could not hold the waters back.
The nearby Tangipahoa River flooded, and Fletcher’s topsoil was completely washed away. When the water receded, its force had left dramatic cuts and gullies across parts of his perfectly graded fields. It was impossible for Fletcher to resume planting without first restoring the soil conditions. In mid-September, he was still trying to find a way to make that happen.
By that point, LSU AgCenter economist Kurt Guidry speculated, damage to Louisiana farms amounted to nearly $277 million.
Worse still was that many farmers, including Fletcher, were still recovering from dramatic flooding in March that impacted parts of north and south Louisiana and caused $90 million in losses to farms. In that event, Fletcher lost most of his 95,000-plant strawberry crop. He was able to get a limited number of plants in the ground when the soil dried but saw no profits in strawberry season.
“If we hadn’t had the March flooding, I’d be in a little better shape to handle this,” says Fletcher, whose personal residence on the farm also flooded in August. “To have them five months apart is tough. We were starting to slowly stand up again only to have our legs taken out from underneath us.”
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