Jenny Broussard and her husband Leonard farm rice on 300 acres of land in southwest Louisiana. “Like everybody else, we lost our crop,” she said. “The rice shoots were beginning to head out, almost ready for harvest. The wind sheared the heads right off.”

This was the year’s second crop. “We pay for fuel and other costs with the first crop. We count on the second to buy seed and supplies for next year,” she said. “It’s going to be hard.”

The region’s agriculture and forestry lost an estimated $472 million from the storm, on top of $1 billion in losses from Hurricane Katrina. For small farmers, this blow compounds the crisis they already face, as the costs for fuel and fertilizer have doubled recently, while the prices they get for crops have remained the same or, in some cases, declined.

“It takes a lot of fuel to farm rice,” Broussard explained. “And the equipment is very expensive. You just keep patching it up for decades to keep it running because it costs so much.”

Leonard Broussard described the effort his wife and others organized to help those evacuated from the New Orleans area following Katrina. “A bunch of them worked together,” he said. “They took over a park and building in Cameron Parish. Got people places to sleep. Cooked meals day after day.” Referring to government officials, FEMA, and the Red Cross, he said, “We never saw any of them. The only help people got was what was organized here.”

Small farmers in the area also worked together to rescue cattle and horses from the flooded Cameron Parish, which bore the brunt of the 20-foot storm surge from Rita. “Lots of cattle and horses drowned in the marshes,” Leonard explained. “We hauled cattle for three days straight.” He said they rigged up barges to haul the cattle up the Intercoastal Waterway system to dry pasture. “One farmer led a group that saved 1,500 to 2,000 head of cattle. Farmers in Cameron say we helped them keep 80 percent of their cattle alive.”
 
 
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