BATTLEBORO, N.C. — Mother Nature is always one of agriculture’s biggest adversaries and depending on the day, she can help or harm.
Last Wednesday when an EF3 tornado spun through eastern parts of Central North Carolina, it ripped largley through rural areas, tearing up the farmland squarely in its path.
What You Need To Know
- The tornado destroyed an agricultural packing house
- Thousands of bins of produce were lost because of the disaster
- Battleboro Produce is one of the largest growers in Nash and Edgecombe counties
Battleboro Produce’s packing house was the last stop on the tornado’s path of destruction before it pulled back up into the sky. But to their dismay, not before it sliced through the building, tearing off portions of the roof and crumpling metal beams like they were paper.
“This part here, that’s still intact, other than the big hole in the side and the top,” Michael May, a general contractor and the builder of the packing house, said. “It wasn’t quite designed for 150 mile-an-hour winds.”
But regardless of the tornado, they have a harvest to get back to. The longer the workers spend cleaning up the fields, the more loss everyone incurs as ripe produce goes to waste, and grocers deal with empty shelves.
“It came at a bad time with the watermelons,” Joel Boseman, the owner of the packing house, said. “So we're moving our equipment to another building. We try to get it back going.”
Unfortunately, he said it’s too late for the produce that was stored in the packing house or sitting in the field. With no electricity, they’ve lost thousands of bins of potatoes and watermelons.
“They're starting to rot because they've been three days with no refrigeration,” Boseman said.
“It’s bad to see him in this shape, especially the watermelons coming in season today, and the line supposed been in there up and running,” May said about Boseman. “Nothing slows him down. He's the best you can meet.”
The loss is great, but they’re thankful the building was empty when the tornado hit. If it had been thirty minutes earlier, the packing house would’ve been full of workers sorting produce in the exact area the tornado demolished.
“Where the worst of the destruction is, that's where everybody was standing at,” May said. “It was a miracle nobody was in there.”
Once insurance has completed their report, they said they’ll have things cleaned up in no time. Getting the metal for a repair job this size, however, is where May says the challenge is going to be.
Although it may not look pretty, they all still have smiles on their face even as clean up continues.
“All the rest of the local farmers call and make sure they can do anything to help or if he needs extra manpower, so everybody comes together on these situations,” May said.
