How one North Carolina farm is coping post-Helene

It’s been almost three weeks since Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, and the team at Hickory Nut Gap Farm have already made considerable progress cleaning up debris. 

For some, the work was a way to cope with the chaos. “I had so many crew members that usually work in the store or in the kitchen, they live around here and they were like, ‘Can we just come on the farm? I gotta stay busy right now,'” said Virginia Hamilton, the farm’s operations manager. 

Hickory Nut Gap Farm is in Fairview, North Carolina, a high elevation floodplain of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s one of more than 9,000 farms in Western North Carolina. The damage to the state’s agriculture industry is still being assessed but will number “likely in the billions of dollars,” said North Carolina State University economist Michael Walden via email. 

With the acute crisis of the storm behind them, the team at Hickory Nut Gap Farms is starting to tally the financial damages. Margins are tight, and the hurricane hit right at the start of their peak season. 

“It hitting at harvest time is like an extra punch in the gut…more than half of our revenue [is] squeezed into the last quarter of the year. So two weeks of revenue loss there is pretty massive for us,” Hamilton said.

The farm store’s refrigerators are humming as the team is preparing to reopen for the first time in weeks. Hamilton said that the store typically brings in a million dollars a year in revenue. With Asheville’s restaurants closed, which were a big source of business for the farm, they’re banking on neighbors coming to the store when it reopens. 

“I really don’t know what people are gonna want to buy,” Hamilton said. Many in the area still don’t have water or power. 

“Are people gonna be cooking? Are they gonna wanna do dishes? Like, I was doing dishes in the creek. It’s romantic for a couple days and then you’re really ready for paper plates,” she said.

The next morning, Katherine Malsbary and her husband Gerald stood bundled against the cold, pacing excitedly in the gravel parking lot outside the farm store. They arrived 20 minutes before opening, eager to shop. They drove from Black Mountain, over 20 miles to the north. 

“We have just the one store in town…they’re running really, really low on food and nothing fresh. So we came down to get something we can barbecue,” Katherine Malsbary said.

The Malsbarys were the first of many customers in the store that morning. The staff’s energy shifted from nervous to excited, as more customers flowed into the store, sharing stories from the storm and stocking up on groceries. 

It’s a good sign, but there’s lots of work ahead for Hickory Nut Gap Farm. 

“There’s a lot of damage that happened that’s not going to be covered by insurance,” said Hamilton. “There’s probably some agricultural program out there that I can tap into but I haven’t had the internet to be able to figure that out yet.”

For now, she’s focused on getting the store back up and running, and tracking down some pigs that have escaped their makeshift pen.