‘A lot of uncertainty’; NC sweet potato farmers anxious about what Florence did to this year’s crop
Information like that will be useful when he's able to harvest. Sweet potatoes don't like being submerged, and Scott's crews will skip places where water has stood for days.
The problem for
Because sweet potatoes grow underground, farmers won't know the storm's impact on their crops until they can resume the harvest when the fields have dried out.
"How much impact from the rain may not be known for weeks to come," Scott, the vice president of sweet potato operations, said Thursday.
State officials say it's too soon to estimate the losses farmers have suffered as a result of
Gov.
"We're going to have to take a special approach to our farming communities, because they have taken a gut punch," he said.
Crops that were harmed by the storm's gusty winds, such as tobacco and corn, will be easier to assess.
The workers who harvest sweet potatoes will know right away in many cases if the crop has been submerged too long. A plow turns the mounded potato plants over, and a crew of workers follows, picking up good potatoes and leaving the bad. A waterlogged potato will be darker and soft.
"You grab it, it will be mushy," Scott said.
The
Scott says his workers picked about 20 percent of this year's crop before the storm hit, which is more than most. Overall, about 90 percent of the state's sweet potatoes were still in the ground when
Two different storms
That's one difference between
Matthew dropped all its rain quickly -- about 16 inches around
"The water came in so fast," Burch said. "It ran off quick and was gone."
"They're not looking great at this point," he said Tuesday. "But with some sunshine and dry weather, we hope we'll have minimal loses. When you're a farmer, you've always got to be optimistic and hope for the best."
In terms of livestock,
Sweet potatoes like well-drained soil, which is an advantage when heavy rains come. But the soil and elevation can vary from field to field and from one part of a field to another, Thornton said, so the crop damage can be spotty where water pools or doesn't drain easily.
"When you look at farmland in
Farmers usually begin harvesting sweet potatoes in late August, but they got started late this year because of a dry June. They were hoping to get a bit more rain to plump them up, said
"We were just holding out for a little bit more rain," McIver said. "We weren't expecting a hurricane to come through."
McIver won't venture a guesses on losses, but because
Another effect of the storm is a break in the fall harvest time, now a week and counting. Farmers and their crews usually work in to November getting their potatoes out of the fields. A late harvest means a risk of a frost or freeze that can also ruin a crop, Scott said.
"It adds up to a lot of uncertainty," he said.
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