November 2024 FloridAgriculture eNewsletter

By J. Scott Angle
[email protected]
@IFAS_VP

Christa Court helps you bounce back from hurricanes. She asks what happened on your farm, combines your account with hundreds of others, and tells the big story in numbers.

She tells that story to members of Congress, disaster relief officials, commodity association leaders and a public that needs reminding that you are the bulwark against empty grocery store shelves.

Court is the UF/IFAS day-after economist. Legislators and disaster relief officials rely upon her numbers and reports in making decisions on disaster declaration, recovery, and relief.

After the winds die down and the Weather Channel leaves, after you’ve had a first look at trees down on fences, cotton blown away, fields flooded and center pivots mangled, she leads us in asking the collective question: How bad was it?

Your communications team at the Farm Bureau shares links to her surveys to collect the information she needs to make the case for relief. I urge you to participate in these surveys, for your own sake and to help the entire Florida agriculture industry. She’s got three going now:

Hurricane Debby Damage Survey
Hurricane Helene Damage Survey
Hurricane Milton Damage Survey

Court joined UF/IFAS Department of Food and Resource Economics in 2016. It wasn’t her plan for so much of her work to focus on the impact of disasters, but they came in rapid succession – including Irma, Michael, Sally, Ian, Idalia, Debby, Helene, and Milton.

But she chose the work because it was guided by her ethic – to do what producers need from their land-grant university.

Over time, she built a team with specialists in economics, GIS, policy, project management, and communications. That combined expertise produces not just numbers and reports but maps and other visuals that relate with compelling imagery the scope and scale of weather damage.

The day-after economist is working hard to get you to the year after, the decade after. Her work can drive a conversation about more and better risk management tools.

Court’s work will in the long run produce insights on what kind of programs are needed and at what funding levels. Then Florida agriculture can advocate for them.

When you answer a UF/IFAS damage survey, you’re helping Court help you in two long-term ways.

First, with every storm she builds bigger disaster-specific databases that will someday allow for accurate and rapid damage assessment without the need for surveys. No more filling out forms at moments when you’re hurting and need to be doing other things.

Second, Court and her team are refining data collection to develop a single industry standard so that you’re not asked to answer redundant questionnaires from academics, agencies and associations.

Every state’s farmers suffer weather damage. Not every state has a Dr. Christa Court. Two years ago, the Southern Agricultural Economics Association honored her with the Outstanding Extension Program Award. Colleagues in other states ask Court to share her expertise in documenting damage in detail rapidly and accurately.

Please continue to help her help you. Some day she may get us to a post-survey world. But right now, she needs you to tell your individual story so she can tell the collective one.

Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).