From displaced cattle to leveled crops, the stories we are hearing from rural America following Hurricane Helene’s destruction are gut-wrenching.
The North Carolina Farm Bureau’s President says that it is still too soon to tell the storm’s total damage.
According to Shawn Harding, “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.”
Sadly, Harding says that the state’s livestock industry was also hard hit with dairy farmers now trying to find cows which were swept away by the powerful water.
“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 actually, 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,” he adds.
