What is it like having a hurricane hit your farm? Imagine floods so big it displaces your cattle. Imagine your crop leveled just as you were about to harvest. That’s the story from the North Carolina mountains. 

Shawn Harding is the president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau. Hurricane Helene did not hit Shawn’s strawberry farm, but he’s been fielding calls from members around the state who need help rebuilding.

“It’s still too early to know. Quite frankly, we’re still in a process of search and rescue, trying to find people, and just trying to make sure everybody’s okay. Obviously, we know there’s going to be tremendous agriculture damage from this storm. A lot of the farming in that mountainous area is in the river bottoms, and so those river bottoms have flooded, and the corn’s gone, and vegetables, crops, so a lot of damage, yeah.”

He also says livestock agriculture got hit hard as well.

We know of dairy cows that were swept up in the water. Dairy farmers are trying to find their cows later on to make sure they were okay. So, it’s those kind of stories we’re hearing up in the mountains, and it’s heartbreaking, really.”

Harding says the Farm Bureau unfortunately has too much experience in helping people deal with recovery efforts.

I guess I would say, unfortunately, we’ve been through this before, and so we pretty much know what to do in these situations. We have a foundation that’s set up. We immediately open up that foundation for people who just want to give money and don’t know what else to do, and we make sure that money goes to help farmers survive after these storms. We also partner with groups that are boots on the ground, so your Samaritan’s Purse is in Boone, where a lot of damage was, and so they’re helping people. Red Cross, who everybody thinks about. And then we have a group in our state called Baptists on Mission, and so we’ve helped partner with them to get equipment that they need, whether it’s chainsaws or excavators, to clean up farms and feed the boots on the ground. That’s our role.”