WESTERN N.C. — Effects from Helene's destruction have rippled across western North Carolina and beyond as growers contributing to the nation’s food supply are still impacted by the storm's powerful blow. Every agriculture producer faced a different battle after Helene—livestock farmers rounding up animals, row crop farmers suffering a lost harvest, and orchards and nurseries looking at years of growth gone in the the floods and mudslides.
Four months after Helene plowed through their acreage, farmers are looking to start plowing fields. Growing season in the mountains is slightly later than other areas of the state, but with spring coming up fast, what wasn’t an immediate priority after the storm, is now at the top of the list.
Farmers know the unpredictability of nature all too well. Each year is a gamble for them, but Helene was a fresh reminder of just how powerful it can be, not only sweeping houses and vehicles downstream, but valuable acreage used for farming with it.
Many farms in the mountains are located in what’s known as “bottom lands” — the edges of rivers that produce fertile soil for crops – areas that are also highly susceptible to flooding. Farmers did everything they could to prepare for the storm, moving livestock, hay and equipment to what they thought was higher ground, but Helene was worse than anything they ever imagined.
“It's not like we didn't expect a flood,” Stuart Beam, a farmer in Rutherford County, said. “We didn't expect 21 feet of water. We didn't expect houses to be moved from a quarter mile upstream and now be in the field.”
The damage left behind in their fields is crippling—four feet of sand in some places, massive rocks and timber from landslides. When floodwaters reached a certain point, crops could no longer be harvested due to the risk of contamination, so many fields still sit with dead stalks of corn smashed to the ground by water as a reminder of the loss.
“I've done this very same walk multiple times, and it doesn't get any easier,” Linda Pryor said as she stepped on the remains of what would’ve been a good corn crop. “It's heartbreaking because you know how much planning and just how much faith goes into when you plant anything. And so it's heartbreaking every time you see it.”
Agriculture is already on the decline in the mountains, facing development pressure and tight profit margins. For some, Helene was the final straw.
“Most of the farmers in this area are 60 plus,” Sierra Bryant, the director of operations at TRACTOR Food & Farms, said. “So it's a lot easier to cash out that early retirement than it is for them to just stand overwhelmed at their farm trying to figure out where to begin.”
TRACTOR Food & Farms is a nonprofit food hub that partners with farmers to help them find local markets for their products, but since Helene the focus has become helping farmers bridge the gap between what their income would’ve been had Helene never come their way.
“It took so long to get any farmers to say that they were bad off or they needed help,” Gretchen Ferrell, the farmer services coordinator for TRACTOR, said. “Everybody's always like, well, other people are worse off than me.”
Brandon and Rachel Townsend are just one couple who Beam ended up in contact with, making a list of their needs and finding resources and volunteers who could help them during recovery.
“Had I sold everything, every animal that we had and most of my equipment, I wouldn't have been able to pay for the fencing it would have taken to rebuild this, not to mention the debris removal, the hay, the grading work, all that,” Brandon Townsend, a cattle farmer in Avery County, said. “The only reason we're still here is because of the generosity of other farmers.”
All of them have managed to stay in the industry, but as time has passed since the storm, they’ve begun to consider what this means for other farmers and whether they’ll be able to recoup enough income to go another year.
“It's part of our heritage, it’s part of our culture, and I hate to see that lost just because people are not able to fix their land back the way that they want to, to be able to farm it,” Kevin Wilson, a farmer in Yancey County, said.
Many of these farmers are part of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, a nonprofit organization of growers working to advocate for the farming community since 1936. Today, more than 500,000 farm families are members. They’ve been instrumental in providing and organizing aid for the agricultural community since Helene hit western North Carolina.
Local agriculture producers stepped up to fill the void left by an inoperable food system due to its reliance on hauling in products from other regions. They started by using Big Bottom Milk Company’s milk bottling plant to bottle water and deliver it to hard hit communities, like Swannanoa, Black Mountain and Chimney Rock.
“Over the course of the 60 days that we operated that, we raised over $80,000, and we bottled probably 35,000 gallons of water that we sent out,” Beam said.
They saw to their own emergency needs, and then let the rest of their personal recovery efforts wait as they stepped up to care for their community, butchering cattle, donating meat, eggs, corn meal and flour to those in desperate need of food as recovery stretched on from the late September storm.
“If there was somebody that needed support, the farmers here found a way to get it to them any way we could,” Beam said. “We don't look at it as generosity. It wasn't generous of us to do it we don't think, it's just what you do for your neighbors, what you do for anybody in need.”
Years like 2024 force a hard and realistic look at the agriculture industry.
“Farming is ultimately a business, and it's our business, so you have to be practical in the decisions that you make, and you can't just continue to throw money at something that isn't going to be successful for you and for your family,” said Pryor, with Hilltop Farm in Hendersonville.
But agriculture is more than a livelihood for many of them, it’s a passion, and that means weathering the storms that come.
“It happens, and we get hard times,” David Pittman, a Christmas tree farmer in Avery County, said. “You can quit or dig deep, and so that's what I'm doing is going to do whatever it takes to repair it and keep it going.”
Each of them expressed their gratitude for the people in western North Carolina and the resilience shown over the past four months.
“Whatever Mother Nature has in store for us next, we will make it through it, because of what we learned and the connections we made. Because of Helene,” Beam said.
