‘Anything’s gonna help us’

The Georgia Department of Agriculture opens the application portal March 16 for the Georgia Hurricane Helene Block Grant Program, which distributes $531,236,000 in federal relief funds. The application window closes at midnight on April 27.

For timber farmers in central and south Georgia, Monday’s opening marks the first major reimbursement opportunity since Helene made landfall in late September 2024. 

The Georgia Forestry Commission estimates the storm damaged or destroyed roughly 1.47 million acres of forestland statewide, with total timber losses reaching approximately $1.28 billion.

John Morris knows those numbers firsthand.

Morris manages about 22,000 acres of timberland across five counties in southeast Georgia, with the heaviest damage concentrated in Jeff Davis County. He estimates Helene cost his operation between $10 million and $10.5 million. His crews have worked five and six days a week for the past 16 months clearing storm-damaged timber.

“We have been cutting timber five, six days a week for the last 16 months on just hurricane damaged wood,” Morris said. “We had up to eight loggers working at one time on ours to help us get a little ahead.”

The cleanup has been complicated by a market in freefall. Morris says the closure of International Paper’s Savannah mill — which operated for more than 75 years — created a bottleneck that squeezed the entire region. Mills that remained open placed strict caps on how much timber they would accept, leaving loggers with storm-damaged wood and nowhere to send it.

“Mill prices went down,” Morris said. “Every logger I know is on quota, so you can only haul what the mills will let you.”

“A lot of loggers have already gone out of business.”

Despite 16 months of cleanup, Morris says significant work remains. He still has hundreds of acres of leaning trees to address and worries a dry spring could trigger a bark beetle outbreak in weakened stands. He and his family planted 2,000 acres of new trees this year — a crop that will take 30 to 40 years to mature.

The block grant won’t erase those losses, Morris said, but it is a start.

“It’s not gonna make anybody whole,” he said. “It may make you a little more whole, it may make you half whole, who knows — but anything’s gonna help us.”

Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper announced the program in September 2025. The state covers more commodity and loss types than any other state participating in federal Helene relief efforts, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture. Covered losses include timber, infrastructure, poultry, beef and dairy cattle, milk production, pecans, blueberries, citrus, nursery crops, plasticulture and bare-ground practices.

Timber payments are based on pre-hurricane values of damaged stands. Minimum loss requirements apply to all categories.