New Soil & Water supervisor talks Helene recovery

The last two months have been a whirlwind for Blair Thompson.

As farm manager at Warren Wilson College, Thompson has been working long hours helping clean up the campus’s agricultural fields, which were devastated by flooding from the Swannanoa River when Tropical Storm Helene hit Sept. 27.

The Swannanoa school’s 300-acre farm lost 17 pigs as well as this year’s crop of 20 acres of corn, Thompson says. And about 130 acres of pasture that feed sheep and cattle are buried under sand and will have to be replanted.

“We’ve got tons and tons of sediment and sand, up to 4 and 5 feet deep in certain places,” he says. “And then there’s a large amount of inorganic litter. It’s just tragic to clean it up because you’re constantly coming into contact with the refuse of people whose homes were upended. It’s just an inordinate amount of work.”

Amid all that activity, Thompson was busy running for public office. On Nov. 5, he was elected to a four-year term as a Buncombe Soil & Water Conservation District supervisor. Thompson received 80,148 votes while opponent Stu Rohrbaugh of Asheville got 31,893.

“I feel very grateful and happy to be involved [with the Soil & Water Conservation District], but it certainly is like, ‘Oh man, this is a whole other set of things to deal with,'” he says.

Protecting water quality

Soil and water conservation districts are state governmental subdivisions, established under a 1937 law. Districts mostly follow county lines. North Carolina has 95 single-county districts, including Buncombe, and one multicounty district.

The Buncombe district has a staff of eight and is overseen by a board of five unpaid supervisors. Two supervisors are appointed by the state Soil & Water Conservation Commission, and three are elected by county voters. Thompson will be one of those three.

The board mostly oversees state funding programs, including the N.C. Agricultural Cost Share Program and the Agricultural Water Resource Assistance Program. The board approves the allocation of state money to fund projects by farmers and others designed to protect water quality and soil health, says Jennifer Harrison, director of the county’s Soil and Water Conservation District.

In a typical fiscal year, the district allocates around $60,000 for projects in areas like stream restoration, stream bank stabilization and cropland conversion. It also provides technical assistance, drawings and designs, and supervises construction on all projects to ensure they meet program standards.

For instance, Harrison says, a farmer who wants to build a fence to keep his cows from wading in a stream on his property could apply for funding. Keeping cows out of the stream is important because fecal waste can make it unsafe to drink or swim in the water and can kill aquatic flora and fauna.

If the board approves the project, the farmer pays for the work and then is reimbursed for 75% of the costs once the job is complete.

Supervisors also oversee environmental education programs and hold conservation easements for property under the county’s Farmland Preservation Program. That program encourages property owners to voluntarily preserve farms and forestland from development.

Thompson, a native of Kansas, has worked in agricultural jobs all over the country. He became farm manager at Warren Wilson in 2020.

“Having that agriculturalist perspective [on the board] is something that I think is valuable,” Thompson says. “I’ve seen how these programs work and why they work or don’t work. That’s pretty useful, especially if we do care about making inroads with farmers and being able to see what local agriculture we do still have left in our region continue and thrive into the future.”

Thompson says WNC presents unique agricultural challenges.

“This is not a land-extensive area where you have thousands and thousands of open acres to do corn planting or things like that,” he explains. “These are farmers making do with smaller spots and figuring out ways to stay profitable on a per-acre basis.”

The problem was only compounded by Helene, which caused catastrophic loss of crops, infrastructure, markets, topsoil and more at many local farms, he says.

Helping farmers recover

Thompson, who takes office next week, says Helene has put the important but usually obscure work of the district in the spotlight.

“In some way, it’s just a reminder of the things we already knew, but just in a pretty stark way,” he says. “It makes you understand the importance of the work of making sure all of us citizens understand about our waterways and about giving farmers the tools to implement good conservation practices.”

Thompson has not had much communication with other supervisors or district staff since he was elected. He says they are slammed, and he is trying to stay out of the way. But he knows his new position will play an important role in the recovery efforts of local farms.

“The Soil and Water District is going to be involved in figuring out how to help farmers put their land back together in a way that gets them back to productivity,” he says. “And also in a way that maintains the priority of having good conservation practices built into that rebuilding. So I’m still learning about what all that looks like.”

Along with federal agencies like the Farm Service Agency, the district will be involved with issues like fence repair, debris removal and removing heavy sedimentation. Additionally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will play a role in agricultural recovery.

FEMA funds are unrelated to the state money the Soil and Water board oversees, but Thompson says the recovery issues being addressed overlap and he hopes the agency will be as involved as possible in the cleanup.

“Some [federal programs] are going to be directly tied to hurricane cleanup, and some of them are going to be connected to longer-term best practices,” Thompson says. “We can make those two things overlap. That’s got to be the sweet spot right now.”