Helene Aftermath Brings New Challenges to S.C. Farmers

By: Skylar Laird/South Carolina Daily Gazette

RIDGE SPRING — Most of the pecan trees on Yon Family Farms have been standing for 40 years, some as many as 100.

Then Helene came.

The combination of rain and wind from the hurricane, which caused devastation as it swept along the Georgia border and through the Upstate, washed out around three-quarters of the approximately 100-acre orchard. Toppled trees and debris also destroyed miles of fences on the family’s beef cattle farm, Lydia Yon said.

How to report damage

Clemson researchers are asking farmers to report any damages using an online survey.

Farmers can also report damage through the ArcGIS Survey123 app.

To request disaster assistance, farmers should contact their local Farm Service Agency office.

Exactly how much damage Hurricane Helene caused to farms across the state is still unclear. From what researchers surveying the effects have heard so far, though, some farmers, like the Yons, suffered devastating losses that will set them back years.

The destruction is not likely to cause a food shortage, said Adam Kantrovich, a Clemson Extension professor working to survey farmers and get a full picture of Helene’s impact.

The bigger concern is the cost to small farmers, who were already operating on tight margins and now must rebuild destroyed fences, replant toppled trees and recoup the cost of damaged crops, he said.

On top of the most recent storm, the state’s 22,000 farms were already having a difficult growing season, said Stephanie Sox, spokeswoman for the state Farm Bureau.

For much of the summer, most of the state’s counties were in a drought. Then, Tropical Storm Debby went to the opposite extreme, dousing fields in feet of water.

“This whole growing season has been a literal disaster for South Carolina farmers,” Sox said.

Helene just caused the most visible destruction, she said.

“It’ll make you cry to look at,” Gov. Henry McMaster said last week about levelled pecan trees.

Crops

After hunkering down for the night with her family, Lydia Yon went out to survey the pecan orchard her family bought in 1996. The felled trees littered the ground “like corpses,” she said.

“I am certain each member of our family has had a private moment of weeping over the sight,” Yon wrote in a blog post.

The toppled trees would have been ready to harvest in the next few months, she said. This year, the Yons won’t have any fresh pecans to sell at the nearby shop they own, The Nut House and Country Market.

But Yon’s biggest concern isn’t this year’s loss.

Trees need years to regrow. Pecan trees, in particular, don’t start regularly producing nuts until around year 8, and they probably won’t be as productive as before until around year 15, Yon said.

She has no idea yet what the financial impact on the farm will be. She just knows it will be big.

“Obviously the crop damage and the fence damage and all of that is extremely costly,” Yon told the SC Daily Gazette.

Across much of the Upstate, farmers had already prepared their cotton crops for a late September harvest through a process called defoliation, which forces the cotton boles to detach from their stems.

If Helene caught a farm between defoliation and the actual cotton picking, the winds and rains likely swept much of the cotton away, Sox said.

This year, farmers planted 225,000 acres of cotton, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some lost part of their harvest. Others lost everything, Sox said.

“It all just depends on, where were you located?” Sox said.

Some other fall crops, such as peanuts, may have also been affected depending on where farmers were in the harvesting process, Kantrovich said.

Making matters worse is that farmers will have to pay out of pocket for at least some of the damages, if not all of them, Kantrovich said. The number of farmers without insurance, or with only the bare minimum coverage, is unclear, he said.

Some crops, such as the Yons’ pecans, are not eligible for insurance, or can only receive the most basic coverage, based on how common the crop is in the area where it’s growing. Other farmers who are eligible might not be able to afford the extra cost, Kantrovich said.

“The cost of insurance is pretty expensive, and unfortunately, we have many farms, just because of the tight margins that they are already on, they may not max out what they can get covered,” Kantrovich said.

And those who do have insurance almost certainly did not have coverage for 100% of their losses, Kantrovich said.

“Even if they max out what they can get covered, it still doesn’t make them whole,” Kantrovich said. “They’re still taking losses that came out of their own pocket.”

Livestock

Travis Mitchell expects it will be eight months to a year before his Saluda cattle farm gets back to normal. Falling trees destroyed around 3,000 feet of fencing that keeps his 150 cows from wandering, he said.

“You get Band-Aids on fences and mend as best you can to keep cattle in the pasture and off the highways,” Mitchell said.

As executive director of the state Cattlemen’s Association, Mitchell has heard similar stories from cattle farmers all across the Upstate and the Midlands, he said.

Along with fence damage, power outages were a major problem for livestock farmers.

At the peak of the storm, more than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the state lost power. For farmers who rely on wells for water, that meant they couldn’t get fresh water to livestock unless they had a generator to power the water pump, Mitchell said.

The power outage also meant no refrigeration. The Yon family scrambled to save thousands of dollars worth of frozen beef and pecans, eventually tracking down an industrial generator powerful enough to keep the freezer running, Yon said.

Poultry farmers faced yet another issue.

The buildings in which they house chickens need power to keep running at a consistent temperature. With 3,000 poultry farms in the state, Kantrovich estimates that at one point, as many as 10 million birds were in houses powered by generators.

If fuel ran out or a generator stopped working, it’s likely that farmer lost at least some of their flock. Early damage reports suggest more than $1 million worth of losses in bird deaths alone, Kantrovich said.

“However, if you take a look at those quantities of losses that have occurred, it’s still a relatively small percent of the overall,” Kantrovich said.

Falling trees may have killed some livestock, as is fairly typical for a storm this size, Kantrovich said.

“I hate to say it that way, but it’s not necessarily a surprise,” he said.

From the “windshield tours” his team has done, collecting preliminary information about damages to farms, they have not heard of any large numbers of animals killed by the storm, he said.

Moving forward

Despite the enormous losses she faces, Yon is optimistic that her family will be able to rebuild. At this point, she’s grateful that no one was killed and their house escaped the worst of the damage, she said.

The storm had killed 49 people in South Carolina, whether directly or indirectly, as of Wednesday, according to the state Department of Public Safety. Officials are still gathering estimates on how much damage it caused to homes and businesses.

“That’s part of farming,” Yon said. “We know that the weather is always a gamble, so it’s a risk that you’re prepared to take if you’re in this line of work.”

Still, she had never seen damage like what Helene caused, she said.

The storm was likely a wake-up call for farmers who found themselves underprepared, Kantrovich said. No matter how safe they think their area is, farmers should be sure to have a backup plan in case of a similar storm, Kantrovich said.

Being located mainly in rural areas, farms typically have to wait longer to get power restored and roads cleared, Kantrovich said.

Focusing on large population centers first makes sense for local governments and utilities, since those problems affect the most people, Kantrovich said, but he questioned whether farms should be a higher priority.

“It would be nice if our food source, where our food actually comes from, would be marked as essentially mission critical so that in these types of situations, we can make sure that roadways are opened down those paths and that power is derived,” Kantrovich said.

In 2016, legislators gave $35 million to more than 1,200 farmers who lost crops during the massive floods from Hurricane Joaquin the year before. The Legislature approved the farm aid over then-Gov. Nikki Haley’s veto after she refused to ask Congress for help with farmers’ losses.

It’s too early to say whether legislators will put together a similar grant program this year, but they will consider the impact on farmers, legislative leaders told reporters earlier this week. Any decisions they make will happen after the Legislature returns in January.

“I think that’s something we’ll evaluate as we get more information,” said Senate President Thomas Alexander, R-Walhalla.

What is certain is that farmers won’t encounter such opposition this time from the Governor’s Mansion, as McMaster has indicated he supports the idea of an agriculture aid package.

In the meantime, the Farm Bureau is working to distribute funds from its Agricultural Aid Foundation, a nonprofit that collects donations to help farmers after natural disasters. The fund is always active, but the group hasn’t felt the need to distribute money since Hurricane Michael made landfall in 2018, Sox said.

The Cattlemen’s Association also has a foundation accepting donations to help with cattle-specific issues, Mitchell said. He’s hoping for donations of fencing as well, so farmers can start to rebuild their pastures.

Still, it’s possible the state might lose farms that were particularly hard hit, Kantrovich said.

“If we had significant infrastructure damage in a particular location on a particular farm, it may be tricky to restart,” Kantrovich said. “I have not heard of any issues to date on that, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”