Farmer Jamie Burgess has cut the cord to his home internet, landline phone and cable. After back to back seasons of bad weather and low crop prices he needs to cut costs wherever possible.
Floods drowned nearly his entire soybean crop in Williamsburg County last October, preceded by a drought that devastated much of his summer corn. A few bad crops in a row meant no income.
“It has put us in real bad shape,” he said. “It’s just real hard on us. Real stressful.”
The state’s largest industry lost nearly $330 million in crops last fall. Burgess said he can’t afford employees, so the 50-year-old does all the planting and picking for the more than 1,000 acres himself.
“We do what we got to do. My banker said I better start eating bologna,” he said. “And I take him at his word because I brought two bologna sandwiches for lunch.”
The man he calls his banker is Grant Lyerly. He issues loans for ArborOne Farm Credit. He said he has been working with farmers to give them more time to payback their loans. He estimates it could take some as long as a decade to pay back the debt they have accumulated over the past year.
“When you are operating on smaller margins you have got to turn more volume to accommodate smaller profit margins,” Lyerly said.
He understands Burgess’s situation intimately because he also farms. He raises cattle and grows hay and cultivates some corn and soybeans.
“Unfortunately, I had the same situation as them,” Lyerly said. “We went through a terrible flooding issue with my cows. We did sustain a pretty good loss.”
ArborOne and other banks have been turning to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agencyto lower the risk. Larry Rogers has been with the FSA more than 50 years.
“We are doing a lot of guaranteed loans at this point in time because of the huge amounts of carry over debt that the farmers are experiencing,” Rogers said. “These carry over debts for many farmers go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
USDA offices around South Carolina are also inundated with emergency loan applications. The agency quadrupled its loan staff in Williamsburg just to handle the volume. Bill Trado runs that county office.
“There so many more request for farm loans this year. It’s been phenomenal, it’s been exponential. It’s just off the chain completely,” Trado said. “Our demand is tenfold what it would normally be to farm this year.”
Trado said in his 20 years in the Williamsburg office this is the worst devastation he has ever seen. Burgess agrees. His family has been farming this land for generations, but he’s concerned about the future given this economic climate.
“I’m a third generation farmer and if things don't change I don't think we will see a fourth one.”
State lawmakers are debating whether to designate $40 million dollars to help farmers in the form of grants to cover production costs. But Governor Nikki Haley has said she plans to veto the bill arguing farmers shouldn’t be treated any differently than businesses, which didn’t get this type of aid.
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