Chris White is 46 years old. For more than half of that time, he’s been a blueberry farmer in his hometown of Baxley, Ga. He’s seen a lot, both as a farmer and also as a resident in southeast Georgia, an area of the country that’s not quite hurricane ground zero but that can certainly find itself adjacent to the many tropical storms and hurricanes that make landfall each year.
But he’d never seen anything like what happened to his community the night of Sept. 26, 2024.
Located in the southeastern part of the state, Baxley was one of the many towns that took a direct hit from Hurricane Helene. Overnight, the hurricane pummeled the area with 100-plus mph wind gusts and rainfall that triggered flooding, resulting in 37 deaths in the state.
When White and his fellow farmers awoke the next morning, they were unprepared for what they saw.
One of the farms that makes up Appling Blueberry Farms had sat ripe with mature blueberry bushes just the day before. Now, it was decimated – the entire blueberry canopy flattened to the ground. Surrounded by debris, he recalls having to walk 3 miles on foot to get to his equipment shed.
“I drove the tractor back here to the field and when I pulled to the road and saw it, I just turned around and didn’t come back for six days,” White says.
“Just imagine the entire thing on the ground. “It was devastating,” he adds.
Down the road in the neighboring city of Alma, Randy Miller spent the morning with the same ache in his gut. Looking out on his family’s timber operation, Miller saw his 1,400 acres of timberland in shambles.
“We lost 300 acres of timber in the 30 to 40-year range,” he says.
Miller thought of his timber acres largely as his 401k — a savings he could grow to maturity and then harvest as a security blanket for retirement.
“I’m 64 years old, and that was basically my lifetime’s marketable timber that was gone,” he says.
The Clean-Up
While White remained in denial about his crop’s demise, Miller didn’t have the time. Even felled timber has a window where harvest remains possible, but time is critical. He started calling his timber cutting contacts, but he was already behind. Other landowners had called before him.
“It took months before they could get to us,” Miller says.
“Before the Hurricane, we sold 60 acres of timber worth roughly $4,000 per acre,” he says. “After it, we picked up 150 acres and got a check for $47,000.
“Some people got nothing, so we were lucky that we’d gotten $4 a ton for ours, which is basically nothing,” he adds.
In Baxley, White finally started ripping out his destroyed blueberry bushes. In order to plant more, he had to start from scratch and rebuild the field infrastructure, such as bark mounds and drip lines.
But then he couldn’t find plants.
“We called all over the U.S. to find plants,” he recalls. “We had plants come from Oregon and Florida. We really had to struggle to get them.”
White’s last new plant went into the ground in February. He says he’s not sure that any of that quick rebuild would have been possible without emergency assistance from USDA.
“The FSA Tree Assistance Program (TAP) was a very big blessing to put them back,” he says. “They paid an amount for the soil preparation and then so much per plant for the replant.
“It definitely wasn’t something that would bring you debt-free on it, but it was something that wouldn’t put you in a real financial bind,” he adds.
Planning for the Future
The devastation left in Helene’s wake wasn’t just plant loss for many farmers. The rushing water from torrential rain combined with the hurricane-force winds blew critical topsoil, sending it into nearby fields, ditches and roadways.
Part of the recovery for growers like White was moving and replacing dirt.
“We hauled in about 60 dump truck loads of dirt and put the soil back where it had eroded,” he recalls.
He wasn’t the only one. Neal Boatright, a fourth-generation farmer who grows more than 6,000 acres of cotton, peanuts and blueberries at scale, also had to get to work relocating soil on his farm. He noticed a difference in erosion in his no-till acreage and the areas where he harvest-tills crops such as peanuts.
“We brought it back from the lower side of the fields and put back and leveled and tried to fix it,” he says. “We have conventional tillage areas that wash worse.”
Growers such as White, Miller and Boatright have seen the weather changing around them. While they say they’d never seen a hurricane or tropical storm hit their region with such devastation as Helene did, they aren’t sure it is going to be the last one.
Their rebuilding plans are a combination of put-back and pre-planning for mitigation of future potential weather catastrophes.
In his rebuild, White worked to secure grants that would allow him to experiment with cover crops in between his blueberry rows. The farm that was lost totally last year now has a diverse cover crop mixture locking his soil in place.
At one point in the growing season, his cover crop mixture stood 6 feet tall, towering above his blueberry bushes. In addition to protecting the soil, White says the cover crop is yielding other benefits as well.
“It dries the middle out a lot quicker because you have so much sucking the rain and that helps a bunch,” he says. “Because we planted several different plants, our nematode pressure has been way down and the weed pressure too.
“We’ll keep a cover crop here twice a year now, one in the summer and one in the winter,” he adds.
Boatright has been cover cropping his land and sees the benefits in preventing erosion as well as building organic matter in the soil.
“It not only saves erosion by that cover crop growing, it helps retain some nutrients for the next year, builds up organic matter and helps with suppressing weed pressure,” he says. “All that added together makes a good cover crop worthwhile.”
Lasting Impact
While growers and landowners have spent this past year cleaning up and putting their land and assets back together, many worry that the devastation of Hurricane Helen may have generational impact.
Kevin Eason didn’t have to destroy many of his blueberry plants, but even though they survived, the yields this year seem to be suffering.
“What we’ve come to realize is some fields that we didn’t think were damaged, production was down significantly,” he says. “What’s going to happen a year from now, two years from now, three years from now?
“What are going to be the lingering effects of what happened with the Hurricane?”
As he drives down the road on his land and in his community, Boatright can still see areas that harken back to the immediate aftermath of the storm a year ago.
“There was probably more wind damage from that one storm than all the wind damage I’ve ever seen in my whole life added together in this area,” he says. “This was devastating to the timber industry and will have years of effects.”
Miller is keenly aware of the generational impact that his timber losses will have for his family.
“It’s just a sickening feeling because you have totally lost your hearts, not just in the pocketbook,” he says. “I have a kid, and he has two kids that are coming up, and we want to turn it over to them in good shape.
“It’s not a one-year quick fix.
“This is going to take years,” he says. “Probably five years from now, we’ll still be able to ride through and see where this Hurricane hit us.”
