Story by Eliza Benbow
Cover photo by Danielle Hart
Six months after Hurricane Helene flooded the Swannanoa River, the Warren Wilson College Farm fields alongside the river are still covered in sand and silt.
Debris, including tires, metal scraps and branches, still sit in random piles throughout the fields. The livestock—primarily pigs—that usually live there are being kept in temporary pens until they can be returned.
Sof Smith, a senior business major at Warren Wilson and the farm’s ‘pig boss,’ still has to crawl through fallen bamboo and branches to walk along the river she once swam in with classmates. She may never jump back in before she graduates—she can’t shake the knowledge that, during the storm, the river was contaminated, that it once carried bodies.
Just over half a year ago, Smith watched the river creep across the farm’s fields.
The farm crew had already moved many of the animals to higher ground, but she quickly realized it wouldn’t be enough.
As the storm continued and the floodwaters continued to rise, Smith, along with other students and community members, herded the farm’s pigs to the highest field possible.
Her work took all day and included swimming with a friend into the flooded river to bring a pig caught in the tree line to safety. Along the way, the friend picked up rats clinging to tree branches and brought them back with them.
“Just walking out there – everything [was] under water,” she said.
When the storm finally cleared, many of the farm’s pigs were missing, and the land was devastated. Of the 130 pigs on the farm, 18 died or were never found.
Tracking down missing live pigs took weeks, but the reconstruction of the farm’s resources, including rebuilding the soil, will take far longer.
So far, students and farm staff have planted barley in the upper fields as a cover crop—plants that are used to protect and restore the soil in preparation for crops that will be harvested.
It’s the first step toward a recovery process that will take months, if not years.The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been helping clear and repair land around the river, but federal aid efforts have been focused on bigger cleaning and infrastructure projects, like restoring the Whitson Avenue bridge, which connects Swannanoa across the river.
Even that project, which connects Swannanoa’s two main roads, was not completed until Feb. 26, nearly five months after the storm first hit.
Now, with the freeze of funding to specific FEMA programs, the wait may be even longer.
According to an assessment conducted by the N.C. Office of State Budget and Management in December, western North Carolina’s agricultural damages and needs totaled nearly $4.9 billion.
Billions of dollars have been poured into the region’s overall recovery so far, but the losses sustained by farmers are even greater. While technology can be replaced and soil can be restored, growers in western N.C. can’t turn back time.
‘Everyone is in different places’
Farmers like Dee Clark, a third-generation Christmas tree farmer in Avery County, lost millions of dollars in revenue in Christmas trees to flooding. Clark said he has had to rely on community grants to fund the initial recovery of his farm, C&G Nursery, because state government funding has not been released yet.
To offset the wait, local efforts throughout the region, and even the state, are providing immediate monetary and educational aid to farmers in the mountains.
Among them is the N.C. Cooperative Extension, a partnership between N.C. State University, N.C. A&T State University and government agencies that run offices in every county in the state. The extension provides educational and science-based resources to the state’s agricultural workers through workshops, fact sheets and technology.
Since the storm, Luke Owen, the Buncombe County Extension Office’s commercial horticulture extension agent, said he and his coworkers have had to wear two hats as they provide regular programming and disaster-specific education.
Initially, the Buncombe County Extension Office was simply connecting growers to resources for immediate needs like funding, Owen said. They then pivoted to testing soil for heavy metals and microbial contamination, which have the potential for affecting existing and future crops alike.
The risk of contamination is serious—if any farmer who had crops in their fields during the storm, they were prohibited from selling them because of the potential of being in polluted soil or water.
In late October, NCSU sent a soil strike team to conduct tests on soil and water at farms throughout western N.C., including the six hardest-hit counties.
By now, any microbial contaminants that could have been in a farm’s soil have been broken down by UV rays, Owen said, and so far, the heavy metal testing being done on soil throughout Buncombe County has not revealed any widespread contamination.
For many farmers, the quality of their soil is a pressing issue moving forward.
Some, like Warren Wilson’s farm, have large sand depositions on their soil. Others have completely lost their nutrient-rich topsoil or their subsoil, which acts as an anchor for plant roots.
“Just depending on who you talk to, there’s a lot of different situations out there,” Owen said. “Our role in just being aware that everyone is in different places of recovery.”
At Clark’s farm, silt and sand have been a large issue for some fields, and deposited rocks have been an issue at others.
Clark said C&G Nursery has been able to focus on the ornamental side of its business to offset the loss of Christmas tree revenue and farm infrastructure, but full recovery has been affected by their lack of financial resources. There’s still a section of the farm that nursery workers can’t reach, he said, because they haven’t had the funds to fix the road to get there.
“We are recovering slowly,” he said. “We’re doing things as we can afford to do them right now.”
Farrah Hoffmire, executive director of Rare Bird Farm in Madison County, said that the farm, which only grows produce for the small group of people who work on the farm, was relatively unaffected by the storm—the biggest work done in their area was clearing roads that were affected by mudslides and rebuilding bridges.
Still, Helene has widened the creeks on their property, decreasing their ability to predict how the land’s creeks will be affected by floods in the future, which adds a level of uncertainty about how to approach future natural disasters.
In Buncombe County, some farmers are planting cover crops, while others have been able to move forward to planting their usual crops for the spring season, Owen said.
Local farmers markets have only recently begun to see some of their farmers back to selling their crops after the storm, but it may take even longer before others who were hit harder to return, if they do at all.
“Farmers are pushing ahead,” Owen said. “I’ve said this all along, but farmers are one of the most resilient groups of people and groups of businesses.”
Sowing the seeds for recovery
Along with support from local organizations, the agricultural community in western N.C. has been shown support in unlikely places throughout the state.
In late March, the Chatham County-based nonprofit Meet My Neighbor Productions, Inc. (MMNP) worked with other organizations to deliver 1,000 cubic yards of compost to farms in western N.C.
Moving that much compost is like moving a mountain to the mountains, MMNP co-founder Charlie Rankin said.
He said that the nonprofit wouldn’t have been able to move as much compost as they have so far without the help of partners like Brooks Contractor, which has been providing compost at a discounted price; TRACTOR Food & Farms, which have helped pay for trucking fees; and Mother Earth Foods in Asheville, which has provided a drop site for transported compost.
“I was surprised at how many people came to the table for the idea of moving the compost, but it is an essential part of these farms,” he said. “It doesn’t rebuild their soil, but it accelerates the process.”
Rankin and his co-founder and wife, Shauna Rankin, began MMNP in 2020 to document and share stories about sustainable, regenerative agricultural practices across the state. They had experience raising funds for farmers during Hurricane Florence, he said, and when Helene hit the mountains, they wanted to find ways to raise money for farmers in that region as well.
MMNP has held auctions and fundraisers, hauled chicken tractors, and brought grow towers to a store that lost produce from local farms so they could grow their own in the store itself.
The most support for regions affected by disasters tends to come immediately following the devastation, Charlie Rankin said, but it takes years to completely recover from a disaster like Helene.
“What we’ve been trying to do is help the farmers operate again,” he said. “Because once you get the economy operating, it kind of speeds up that process.”
On March 19, Governor Josh Stein signed the first part of his Disaster Recovery Act of 2025, which he described in the press release as “… a promising step forward in the long road to recovery for western North Carolina.”
The aid totals $514 million, of which $200 million is allocated to farmers who have experienced crop loss due to the hurricane.
The application for this aid opened April 1 and will remain open until May 4.
Clark said that to get federal aid, C&G Nursery will have to complete all the work needed and be reimbursed a percentage of what was spent.
“You don’t receive any money until after the work is done, and that has been a problem trying to budget our limited resources right now to get that work done on the timeline that we have to get some reimbursement,” he said.
Stewards of the land
The events of Helene made many growers rethink how to best care for their land, Owen said, and made many realize how fragile it can be. Moving forward, many farmers are looking at how to best protect their land.
Since the storm, Owen said his workshops and professional development training are now based more on adaptive plant material and center around how farmers can build back in a more resilient way.
As farmers in the mountains try to get back on their feet, people across the state can support them by returning to the mountains as tourists, eating local food and visiting local markets.
Ultimately, Rankin said, the agricultural community in WNC will improve as the economy improves.
“Things will come back, and they always come back a little better in the end,” he said.
For Smith, who is a senior at Warren Wilson, the most stressful time working on a farm is during a natural disaster, because you have to pick up the pieces as they’re falling.
Working on the farm has been an interesting experience, she said, but not one she plans to continue after graduating with a degree in business.
Still, Smith said her experiences during the storm not only bonded her to the people she worked with, but to the land itself.
“I’ve seen it in a very interesting string of events, and there have been so many emotions behind it,” she said. “As far as people being lost coming down here, and pigs being lost down here, and livestock being washed down from other farms too.”
Each of the 18 pigs lost to the flood are commemorated by Ziva paperwhites, small white flowers that are planted along the fence of the upper field.
Warren Wilson’s farm will be downsizing livestock in the coming months due to the loss of space and resources from the storm—they will be keeping half of their pigs to raise and are finding farms in the area to sell the rest. The farm won’t raise chickens for the next year or more.
The farm crews are rebuilding fences and preparing the land to return animals and crops to the area, but because the college’s farms are not used primarily as a revenue stream, there is not as much economic urgency.
Helene has forced Clark and C&G Nursery, which he began in 1984, to look more critically at how the farm does things – he doesn’t know exactly what the changes made will be, but he said he knows they need to happen.
The storm may have affected Clark’s crops and income, but it hasn’t changed how he sees farming.
“Most farmers are stewards of the land to start with, because if we aren’t, we’re going to put ourselves out of business,” he said. “We try to farm to prevent erosion, to be as environmentally friendly as we can be, and we’ve always taken the land into consideration when we do what we do.”
