Winter’s first cold front bites through, a bitter one for Southern blood, and Larry Ford walks his cotton field.
There is a lot of cotton in the field, but only whiffs of strands remain twisting on any stalk — except in that one spot right there. There Ford harvested 12 acres and clocked a good 1,500 pounds per acre before Hurricane Michael — in a few hours — efficiently picked the rest. The storm didn’t bother to bale the crop on its way out of Jackson County, where its eye passed over midday Oct. 10, 2018.
Ford, 73, is one of the largest and best-known farmers in the county, and grows 2,200 acres of cotton, about 800 acres of peanuts, several hundred acres of corn, and has a successful cattle business with about 100 mama cows, providing top line F-1 Brahman-Angus females to cattlemen for herd replacement.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of series we’ll put forward over the next few weeks. The idea: To travel to Florida one month later, track the eye of Michael as it went over the Panhandle and up into southwest Georgia as a hurricane. We stopped along the way to talk to farmers.)