Business

Helene's farm damage tops $135 million in county

Jerred Nix stands in the middle of what used to be a 7-acre orchard of Granny Smith and Gala apple trees. He watched in real time from the home (with dormers) on the ridge behind him as the Clear Creek floodwaters washed the grove away.

By Bill Moss, Published: December 31, 2024

BEARWALLOW — Jerred Nix got a call from his father at 6 a.m. as Helene was battering Bearwallow Mountain. Jeff, his dad, told him to call the packing house crew and let them know they wouldn’t be working that day.

“I was gonna lie back down. Well, it wasn’t long after that, it jerked the front door off my house,” Jerred recalls. “And I ain’t talking about broke a glass. I’m talking about it ripped the frame off of my house. It sounded like a bomb went off. And I honestly thought that’s what it was — water just pouring in the front door, because the way the wind was blowing. It ripped the siding off the house, and it was leaking in one of the bathrooms.”

At first light, the scope of the hurricane’s damage would come into focus in a slow-moving scene in real time.

“I’m finally getting my bearings about me and I look out the door and at 7:30 the orchard was still standing,” he says. The floodwater was already too high to do anything but witness the astonishing power of nature from his house on a ridge above Clear Creek. That’s what Jerred and his wife did.

“We just got to watchin’ it,” he says. “I took a chair, went out on the porch … By 9 o’clock, the orchard was gone — completely gone.”

Giant trees roared down the creek “like a line of bulldozers” taking out everything in their path.

A couple of weeks ago, Nix, guiding me through the silt and rock covered ground that used to be an orchard of Gala and Granny Smith apples, pointed out landmarks from the epic flood of Sept. 27.

“The water line was over that mailbox,” he says. “Where you look at that house — that house was completely underwater. You still see the sticks and limbs on top of that house.”

He ticks off the inventory of farm equipment lost: a trailer, augur, brush chopper, rotovator, water tanks. “We’ve got buckets, we’ve got forks. I’ve still got stuff missing that we ain’t found yet,” he says. “There’s a loader in the middle of that brush pile over here and I’ve got two loaders that were sitting right back up here that I’ve still not found.”

Where we’re standing, in the middle of what on Sept. 26 was a seven-acre orchard, was 10 to 15 feet underwater.

“We were down here walking the day after the storm because I was trying to find some of this equipment,” he says. “Hell, I found a stop sign in here under the sand. I have no clue where that stop sign come from.”

* * *

Jerred and Jeff Nix, father and son growers, make up one of the county’s most innovative apple farming enterprises. They installed a cold room and apple slicing operation that supplies snacks for public schools across the state and for commercial clients. But if freezes, oversupply of apples, government regulations, foreign dumping and other challenges are a constant challenge for growers, no one alive had ever seen anything like Helene.

The agricultural loss across the region is expected to approach $2 billion, and Henderson County accounts for at least $135 million of that total.

“There wasn’t any aspect of farming that wasn’t impacted,” Terry Kelley, the director of the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service, says. “We’ve got farm roads damaged, we’ve got farm land damaged. We’ve got trees lost, we’ve got equipment lost, we’ve got structural damage, we’ve got revenues lost from agritourism. It’s just such a far-reaching storm to hit so many different things that we’re not used to having to recover from.”

It’s Kelley’s job to get a handle on the magnitude of the loss as accurately as possible, which he did by surveying every farmer he could reach, touring the damaged farms and calculating what recovery would potentially cost.

“We estimate we’ve lost about 60,000 apple trees in the county,” he says. “But in addition to that, you’ve got all of our nurseries that lost trees, whether they’re balled and burlapped or in pots. We may have lost over a quarter of a million of them.”

Like apple trees, the landscape trees and bushes that nurserymen grow are worth much more when they’re mature. For apple trees, that means they’re producing a crop; for a dogwood tree or azalea bush, it means they’re ready to sell to retailers.

“These trees we lost were mature,” Kelley says. “We’re going to be putting back young plants in their place that aren’t ready to sell, they’re going to require two to four years to get ready to sell, or we’re going to have a new apple tree that’s going to require four to five years to be ready to harvest from. So it there’s not just the current loss but there’s the future loss that’s involved. And I don’t know of a program anywhere that’s going to cover that.”

* * *

Agritourism, which capitalizes on the merging of leaf-peeping tourism with the apple harvest and pleasant fall weather, was particularly hard hit.

“You’re talking people that make their living in a 12-week period, and the biggest part of that 12-week period is in October because people are up here to look at leaves,” Kelley says. “And we’re not just talking apples. We’re talking our wineries. We’re talking all of our other U-pick operations” that sell not only apples but cider donuts, pies, jams and jellies and other produce.

“If we hadn’t had two days of torrential rain before the hurricane basically moved across our area, we wouldn’t have had nearly as much damage,” Kelley says. “You had all that rain softening up the soil, collecting in these valleys and starting to run down. But then you come in here with these high winds, and you’ve got trees, some of them which still have a lot of apples on them, so they’re heavy, they’re at their heaviest point all year — fully leaved.”

Kelley has seen apple trees twisted like a slinky.

“I know there was some sort of wind-burst in some of these localized areas. You can look at the trees and, you know, it wasn’t just a strong wind that went across. It had to have been a micro-burst, or a small tornado or something,” he says. “Everything’s wet, heavy and soft, and it’s just right for the maximum amount of damage. It was a perfect storm.”

* * *

The extent of the farm damage is so unprecedented that no aid program has ever been devised to address it. Never has a natural disaster caused so much damage not just to the current season’s crop but to future yield, equipment, farm sheds, barns, farm roads. Large farm fields themselves are left with huge gullies; top soil is washed away.

“When we had the meeting up in Edneyville — and the FEMA folks were there, Congressman Edwards had them in — they said they would try to stretch things out a little bit and maybe more of this will get covered,” Kelley says.

Another unknown is the unseen damage the many perennial crops likely have suffered — berries, grapes, apples, pears.

“We don’t have any clue right now what the future implications are going to be on some of these things,” says Kelley, who holds a doctorate in plant science. “We know what physiology tells us. What we don’t know, for every individual plant in the county, is how much water it was under, how long it was underwater, what kind of root system it may have had to start with, is there now disease setting up in those roots because it was underwater and because it’s injured. So there’s a lot that will yet to be determined.”

Since the Lightning interviewed Kelley in mid-December, Congress passed and President Biden signed a $110 billion disaster aid bill that will channel relief payments to Western North Carolina. But Kelley says farmers tend not to be comforted by headlines about a bill made by politicians until they see details.

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

“Bottom line is, we have faced something that 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 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,” Kelley says. “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.”