By Emmy Powell
Communications Specialist

Hurricane Beryl tore through the Texas coast and traveled up through East Texas, leaving behind a path of destruction to crops, homes and agricultural infrastructure.

Bay City farmer Carey Orsak told the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network it’s too early to know the full extent of the damage on his farm.

“I’ve driven by the fields, but I haven’t really walked into them,” he said. “I just made some drive-by assessments.”

Orsak’s buildings and grain bins, thankfully, were spared from damage.

The storm made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane before weakening into a tropical storm, with winds reaching up to 75 miles per hour (mph) on Orsak’s farm.

His corn crop wasn’t as lucky.

“I wasn’t that worried about the corn, but it looks the worst,” he said. “It was dried down, getting ready to harvest. I thought it would be okay if it just leaned the stalks down and around. But a lot of that corn is flat laying with the rows, so it may be hard to pick it up.”

Grain bins for the United Ag Cooperative in Wharton County were crushed by high winds, according to the co-op’s General Manager Jimmy Roppolo.

Those grain bins had the capacity to hold more than 1 million bushels.

“We must have had a little tornado come through, and it took out about 1.2 million bushels of our 3.2 million bushels facility,” Roppolo said. “It really hammered us, took one whole side out. It’s going to be a tough row for here on out trying to get this corn and grain sorghum and what’s left in the field.”

The co-op has four grain elevators, which collectively hold about 6.2 million bushels across the coast.

Despite the damage to the Warton County facility, they are hopeful the other locations are still able to operate.

“Thank God we have different locations, so we’ll still hopefully be able to operate,” he said. “It may hold up some of our producers a little bit, but we’ll do what we can to move it and get it going.”