'Complete and utter destruction': Kentucky agriculture community suffers after storm

A hatchery that supplied about 200 Kentucky farms, hundreds of heads of cattle and a state-of-the-art research center were just some of the losses the state's farming industry are facing after multiple twisters tore through the commonwealth late Friday and early Saturday.  

In the aftermath of the storm — which included an unprecedented tornado that barreled through communities for more than 200 miles — farms throughout Western Kentucky suffered "complete and utter destruction," Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles said Thursday.

"There's not a camera lens big enough to capture the amount of destruction I witnessed," he said. "The agricultural damage is spread across dozens of counties and each county had farms with complete losses."

In Mayfield alone, four different agriculture businesses were directly hit by the tornado. Pilgrim's Pride Corp. lost both its chicken hatchery and feed mill, and Huston Inc., the largest John Deere dealership in the region, was destroyed.

Additionally, the Mayfield Grain Co., which had over 5 million bushels of grain on site, suffered extensive damage. Several days after the storm, it was still unclear how much of that grain was a complete loss.

The storm victims:Kentucky tornado death count reaches 75 victims. Here are the names we know

Perhaps one of the only positive aspects of the storm, Huston Inc. employee Mark Wilson noted, was that it hit Friday night when far less people were in the area. 

"If this would have happened on a weekday in the middle of the day, it would have been in the hundreds as far as injuries and deaths," Wilson said. "It would have been major."

Just across the street, at least eight people did die after the tornado flattened the Mayfield Consumers Products plant. More than 100 people were inside the candle factory at the time. 

How they survived:Stories from those who made it through the deadly Kentucky tornadoes

The small town of about 10,000 is the county seat of Graves — the state's top county for agricultural sales. Across the state, the industry generated over $5 billion in 2019.

"It will take a couple weeks to wrap our heads around the economic damage that this storm caused," Quarles said. 

Poultry is Kentucky's No. 1 commodity, creating about 11,300 direct jobs and an additional 27,000 indirect jobs, according to a report by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. Aside from the destruction of Mayfield's major chicken operations, at least 30 chicken barns in the region collapsed, Quarles said. 

"Losing one poultry barn has a ripple effect," he said. "That's a source of income, maybe six paychecks a year for a farmer that's gone now."

Aside from poultry, Quarles said the estimate that a few hundred cattle died "conservative," and the extent of damage to farming structures and equipment was unknown. 

About an hour northeast of Mayfield, destruction to an agriculture research center is bound to have a lasting negative impact on the state's farmers, too. 

The University of Kentucky Research and Education Center in Princeton lost more than 90% of its property Friday night, including an 80,000-square-foot building that was less than two years old.

"It’s easier to say what we didn’t lose," center director Carrie Knott said.

Of the faculty and staff offices, labs, meeting spaces and more, just three homes on the land were spared, she said. 

Storm strength:Was the tornado that hit Mayfield an EF5? Here's how the National Weather Service decides.

With about 70 employees, the center focuses on a variety of aspects to farming, such as cattle nutrition, orchard and row crop research and testing soil samples. 

"It’s going to be hard for us as researchers to pick up the pieces and move on," Knott said, pointing to the loss of research stored at the center that decades were spent on. 

"I find it hard to understand how we will have any lab or field research in this coming year," she added. 

In response to the destruction, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture and the Kentucky Farm Bureau Federation launched a GoFundMe account to support farmers, raising just shy of the $50,000 goal within three days. 

Each county extension office is fielding requests from farmers and matching them with donations, in addition to helping farmers understand what federal disaster funds they qualify for, Quarles said. 

"We have a long way to go to dig ourselves out of the damage," he said.

But, he knows several farmers who have already begun that process. 

"They are resilient and they are already repairing structures, fences, etc. because that’s who they are," he said. "They're going to get knocked down and get back up."

Contact reporter Krista Johnson at kjohnson3@gannett.com.