Aside from the devastation at the Cherrystone Family Camping Resort, Governor Terry McAuliffe said Friday that 500-900 acres of corn, 400 acres of cotton and over 1,000 acres of soybeans were damaged during the storm.
David Long owns 2,000 acres of crops on the Eastern Shore. Thursday's storm destroyed 300 acres of soybeans and cotton, plus damaged another 100 acres.
"I've never seen a thing like this. I've never seen a crop that is so completely destroyed that you couldn't tell what was planted," Long says.
He estimates he lost 25 percent of his cotton, which is approximately 250,000 pounds of cotton lint.
"This year's work is gone. You work for a whole year and it's lost," he says.
Long is thankful for his crop insurance but there's no telling what the tornado damage could do for his livelihood.
"It's a tremendous loss. It's not a loss that we can even talk about right now because we don't know exactly what's going to turn out," he says.
But what he didn't lose is his determination to start over.
"Seeing it just a few days ago, everything was in full bloom and now it's gone? That's one of the things in life that you have when you're on the farm, that's the risk you take. Farming is in our blood and we will be farming. It's devastating, it's no doubt about it, but we've got the sun shining, we deal with The Lord sent us rain for our crops, it's not the end of the world. We've been knocked down before and we just get up and keep on working, that's what we do," he says.
