Tropical Storm Helene terrorized Western North Carolina’s farms in late September. Recovering is no easy task. And Helene was the not the first calamity that farmers across the state faced in 2024.
Observations about what’s happened are bringing out strong words from the state’s farming experts.
“The land is just physically not there anymore,” said Luke Owen, a Buncombe County extension agent.
“Generations of wealth were swept away,” said Lynn Gibbard, co-director of Appalachian State University’s Frontline to Farms Initiative.
“This is the worst agricultural year we have had in North Carolina history,” said Mike Yoder, the associate director of the College and Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University.
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Farms tend to be located in the region’s fertile river bottoms, and when those rivers swelled and roared, they took crops, barns, bails of hay, miles of fencing, farm roads, cattle, farm equipment and acres of topsoil.
Higher-elevation farms dealt with landslides and high winds. Loss of refrigeration took out stores of meat and dairy products. Some farmers are dealing with the possibility that they might not be able to recover their farms at all.
One farmer in Boone, Brittany Robinson, owner of Four Winds Farm, lost her life in a landslide. She was a staple of Western North Carolina’s farm community who dedicated her life to feeding the community, according to her Watauga County peers.
The mountains are not the only region of the state with serious agricultural concerns.
In Eastern North Carolina, home to many of the state’s largest and most profitable farms, it is a matter of consecutive bad years: many were counting on this season to lift them out of debt, only to be met with the worst drought in recorded North Carolina history.
When rains did come, they were excessive and poorly timed, including intense rain from Tropical Storm Debby. However, a dry harvest season has allowed Eastern North Carolina’s farmers a semi-sweet ending to another hard year.
In Western North Carolina, no silver lining is in sight.
How Helene ruined farmland
Fields in Western North Carolina were destroyed in one of two main ways.
On some farms, floodwaters washed away acres of topsoil to expose bedrock, leaving massive sinkholes and erasing years of hard work. On others, flooding deposited massive amounts of contaminated sediment, debris and garbage onto fields.
Rebuilding fields, especially those where topsoil was carved up and washed away, is not a simple process. Some of the sinkholes left behind in fields are the size of “five or six school buses,” Henderson County extension director Terry Kelley told Carolina Public Press.
Henderson County lost 60,000 apple trees and 500,000 nursery plants, according to Kelley. He calls it the largest single loss of agriculture in Henderson County history.
“When you have to go back and replace a mature apple tree with a new one, you’re looking at waiting four to six years to start getting those back up into production,” Kelley said.
It will likely take farmers a number of years to rebuild their fields before they can plant anything, Henderson County extension agent Karen Blaedow told CPP. Farmers can’t just buy top soil back. It takes multiple growing seasons to cultivate optimal fertility with tools like cover crops and compost. It is also extremely expensive to start from scratch.
As of right now, these farmers don’t have a playbook to follow.
“They are going to have to figure out a way to replace that topsoil before they will ever grow anything again,” Yoder, at NC State, told CPP.
“We have specialists working on trying to figure out how you do that, but right now, we don’t have any easy answers for them.”
On farms with the reverse problem, removal of the tons of toxic sediment that ended up in fields is expensive and often requires equipment that farmers do not have on hand. Getting this heavy equipment onto farms is nearly impossible due to the state of nearby roads.
The crops that survived in these situations are not marketable due to the contaminants in the flood water.
Even if farmers could sell what was left in their fields, many of Western North Carolina’s crops are niche, farmer’s market products. Roadside stands, farm markets and agritourism venues were shut down during the 12-week period during which they bring in the lionshare of revenue for the year.
Buncombe County extension agent Owen said there is not really a market for fresh, local foods at the moment anyhow. Survivors are focused on affording rent, not on buying local, organic heirloom tomatoes.
Economic devastation for farms
Some insurance companies are trying to avoid the huge payouts that some Western North Carolina farmers require, Gibbard, at App State, told CPP.
“Insurance companies are telling some farmers that they would actually have needed to hold earthquake insurance to cover a landslide,” Gibbard said.
It is rare enough for a farmer in the area to have flood insurance, let alone earthquake insurance.
“Insurance companies are willing to take farmers’ money for premiums, but they don’t understand the business of farming, so they don’t understand their claims,” Gibbard said.
Watauga County dairy farmer Jessica Miller estimates a $30,000 loss in corn and hay equipment alone, though that is nowhere near a complete estimate.
She has taken donations of hay from the extension office to feed her cows, but is worried about where she will get hay going forward.
Hay is a huge problem for farmers with animals to feed. Since many Eastern Tennessee farms sustained serious damage as well, some farmers can’t even find hay to buy, according to Yancey County extension director David Davis.
“There will never be enough hay to meet the need,” Kendra Phipps, livestock agent at Watauga County’s extension office, told CPP. “Those hay donations from out of state are slowing, but we are in desperate need of them.”
In cases where farmers do have hay, or have accepted hay donations, they may no longer have a place to store it due winds or floodwaters destroying barns and other structures.
Miller isn’t the only dairy farmer in the county with serious losses on her hands.
“I know one dairy farmer in his early 80s,” Watauga County extension director Jim Hamilton told CPP. “He said that by the time it would take him to get back to where he was, he would be dead. He sold his entire herd of cattle, and is out of the business.”
Across the region, farmers like this one are choosing to cut their losses and run. Owen says he knows of a couple farms on the river in Buncombe County that will likely never be operational again. Farmers will have to move.
“The problem is going to be, next year, once the donations stop and everybody around us forgets about the storm.” Davis told CPP. “I’m really worried about what’s going to happen to farmers come spring. Some of them are going to have to make very hard choices.”
Gibbard is worried about farmers’ mental health.
“Your family’s lives rely on you being able to respond to this emergency,” Gibbard said. “Once that shock and adrenaline dies down, then the stress hits you. Farmers’ economic stress is extremely serious. It puts people into spaces where they do not feel like themselves. They are depressed. It’s very frightening.”
Farm workers
The livelihoods of the men and women who make their living on Western North Carolina’s farms are in serious jeopardy. A significant number of these farmhands are seasonal and migrant workers, according to Henderson County extension agent Christopher Just.
Many who came to Western North Carolina on H-2A agricultural visas to work the valuable harvest season find themselves out of work entirely. Plus, many lost possessions, housing and vehicles.
“The Latino community got hit pretty hard,” Just said. “They come here for a number of months and live in barrack-like housing near farms in order to support their families. Without that income, many are in dire straits.
“A lot of the farm worker community might not be able to apply for assistance because of language or visa barriers, or they are afraid to make contact with government officials. The application process is tough even for native English speakers.”
What is being done to help?
The USDA is offering assistance to Western North Carolina’s farmers, but navigating the application process is difficult. Many farmers are not tech-savvy to begin with: Sydney Blume of Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture says one barrier is just getting farmers to check their email.
“We are helping farmers navigate the alphabet soup of government programs that could potentially help them in some way,” Haywood County extension agent Sally Dixon told CPP.
“Normally, layers of bureaucracy get in the mix. The government doesn’t work quickly, but business does. It is hard to wait when you are losing money and losing time.”
The order in which you rebuild and apply for assistance matters, Owen pointed out.
“If you do soil remediation practices, but you do it before you apply for government grants, you could take yourself out of the running for those pots of money,” Owen said.
Some losses cannot be addressed by government assistance, such as piles of compost that took years to develop, according to App State professor of sustainable development Anne Fanatico.
Plus, some problems exist with the types of assistance being provided. Some of it comes in the form of low-interest loans. For many farmers, this is not the time to be taking out money against their land, especially when they likely have years of low production levels ahead of them.
“A lot of the funding is reimbursement-based or requires matching, and has a lot of red tape and long applications,” Laney Baker, producer programs coordinator at Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, told CPP.
“The things that are really helping people are direct donations, small grant funds and unrestricted funding.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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