From Staff Reports

HENDERSONVILLE —  While the agricultural loss to the region from Tropical Storm Helene on Sept. 27 is expected to approach $2 billion, Henderson County accounts for at least $135 million of that total, the Hendersonville Lightning reported on Jan. 1.

To that end, during a mid-January meeting, the Henderson County Board of Commissioners emphasized the importance of farm aid after being told  that Helene left many Henderson farms teetering on the brink of extinction.

Also, U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-Flat Rock, and other North Carolina representatives have been urging (then-)President Joe Biden and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell not to shift resources and personnel from the N.C. mountains to California to fight wildfires there.

While Congress recently passed, and Biden signed, a $100 billion disaster aid bill that will channel relief payments to Western North Carolina, the Lightning reported that Dr. Terry Kelley, the director of the N.C. Extension Center in Henderson County, has said that farmers tend not to be comforted by headlines about a bill made by politicians until they see details.” 

Specifically, Kelley was quoted by the Lightning as saying:

“The growers would like them (the politicians) to understand  that it’s their future on the line, it’s their lifeblood on the line. They’re worried, they’re concerned — and rightly so.

“Bottom line is, we have faced something we’ve never faced before, and we’ll hopefully never face again. And we just look at it as one of those situations where we’re going to have to rely on our government to help us get back into business.

“If everybody has to just pick up and go on their own with what they’ve got, there’s not many of them able to do that.

“What’s really at stake is not whether the farmers are made whole for their 2024 crop loss, or even whether they can plant a crop in 2025. The damage is so great that the future of farming may well hang in the balance. A freeze that wipes out the season’s crop doesn’t also wreck the growers’ tractors, sheds and roads and wash away their future source of revenue — the trees themselves.

“It makes the recovery that much harder and that much longer. A lot of people have to question: how are they going to move forward? We’ve got an aging farmer population in this county, and I’m sure some of them are thinking: ‘Am I going to come back from this and continue to deal with all the problems that farming brings?’ They’re valid questions that people are asking right now.”

Another aspect of the agricultural losses, Kelley said, is agri-tourism, which, the Lightning stated, “capitalizes on the merging of leaf-peeoping tourism with the apple harvest and pleasant fall weather” and “was particularly hard-hit” by Helene.

Meanwhile, Kelley told Carolina Public Press in a Dec. 30 interview: “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 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 told CPP. 

Meanwhile, Henderson County extension agent Karen Blaedow told CPP, “It will likely take farmers a number of years to rebuild their fields before they can plant anything. 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.

 Indeed, Dr. Mike Yoder, associate director and state program leader for 4-H, and coordinator: emergency programs for N.C. State Extension, told CPP, “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. 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.”