Hundreds of thousands of homes and business are still without power after Hurricane Laura ravaged southwest Louisiana. Many of the state’s agricultural and livestock farms are struggling to recover from Laura. Among them, poultry farms which are desperately trying to keep hundreds of thousands of chickens alive.
“Most of our poultry farms throughout the state lost power, and they are running on generators and we are getting fuel to the generators to keep the poultry alive,” Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, Mike Strain, explained to WWL First News. “Because several of the large refining facilities are still down, so one of the difficulties is getting fuel into an area that was previously contracted to get fuel from one particular refinery, getting it from another refinery, because most of our fuel system is on a very streamlined production.”
Strain adds the state’s feed mills also are without power, which put the state dangerously close to running out of chicken feed. However, he says that just yesterday two feed mills are now back up and running.
Louisiana’s agriculture farms are also dealing with no power or flooded crops. Strain, says recovering the state’s sugar cane and cotton fields is a priority but the damage is already done.
“We will have a little less sugar there,” he said talking about flooded sugar cane fields. “In some of the areas where we have our cotton about 45 percent of our cotton was already in the ‘bowl stage’ which makes it's susceptible to harsh wind and rain.”
About 27 percent of Louisiana’s rice farms have not been harvested and that will be difficult to do Strain says, because the rice fields are submerged under water.