ATLANTA — Georgia pecan and cotton growers need near-perfect weather in the coming weeks to salvage the mangled mess left in the wake of Tropical Storm Irma, says the state’s top agricultural official.

Some have predicted that last week’s storm likely wiped out 30 percent of Georgia’s pecan crop, but Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black said this week that even that prediction assumes that everything else goes right during the harvest.

“If we harvest 70 percent, people will be delighted,” Black said in an interview this week.

Georgia is the country’s leading producer of pecans. The crop was worth more than $361 million in 2015, which is the most recent year for which information available. Pecans are also regularly one of the state’s top 10 most valuable crops.

Irma proved ruthless with the state’s orchards, uprooting thousands of trees at some farms and blowing immature nuts from branches all across the state.

“This is the worst wind event in the pecan industry that the state of Georgia has every experienced,” said Jeb Barrow, president of the Georgia Pecan Growers Association and a Jefferson County grower who lost about 20 percent of his own crop.

“Everybody was worried about where this storm was going to hit, but it turned out that it didn’t matter. Because there was damage everywhere,” Barrow added.

Cotton is another important crop for Georgia, valued at more than $713 million in 2015, which was a down year. Cotton growers are also looking at major losses, with at least 20 percent likely gone.

It will likely be another three weeks before the actual losses due the storm are known, Black said.

Irma made landfall in the Florida Keys as a massive Category 4 hurricane but lost its strength as it tore through Florida. As a tropical storm, Irma had near-Category 1 strength winds when it reached Georgia last Monday.

The storm struck Georgia farmlands as growers prepared to harvest potentially bumper pecan and cotton crops.

“It was like the bottom of the ninth, and we were up to bat and we had runners on base,” Black said. “That’s how close we were to just a really, really, really good pecan crop. And then boom!”

Sticking with the sports analogy, Black also likened the post-storm feeling to how Falcons football fans felt earlier this year after the squad blew a 25-point lead in the Super Bowl and lost to the New England Patriots.

“That’s the devastation and the disappointment, at a much more serious level, that these producers are feeling,” he said.

Black said cotton fields all across Georgia are full of mangled and twisted plants, which will complicate the harvest.

The economic losses aren’t even the extent of it. For pecan growers, the storm damage can mean losing a decade spent nurturing a tree to maturity. It can take a pecan tree about a dozen years to become fully productive.

“There’s an emotional and psychological toll, thinking, ‘Here I am a producer and I’ve invested my life and now 14 years of it is gone in six hours with no way to immediately replace that,’” Black said.

“I can see it in my friends’ eyes,” he added. “That’s one of the tougher parts of this event.”

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.