Agriculture commissioner says it's too early to assess
By Steve Herring
Published in News on October 17, 2016 11:05 AM
It looks as if the ocean has come to Raleigh.
That, state Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler said, is the first thing he thought of Monday while flying over flood-ravaged eastern North Carolina.
"'Oh, my God' is what I said," Troxler said. "It was incomprehensible. In flying over eastern North Carolina and observing the floodwaters what I saw was something of catastrophic proportions. You can't believe it until you see it. I have seen houses under water, cars and trucks under water, farm equipment under water -- whole farms that are completely inundated with water.
"We have seen farmers rescuing neighbors with tractors. The bad thing is even after the water gets down in some cases there is going to be so much infrastructure damage on the farms that in some cases they are not even going to be able to go once the water gets off them."
All of that water has got to get to the ocean and it has to come through eastern North Carolina to do so, he said.
It is "way too early" to assign a dollar figure to agricultural and livestock loses caused by the devastation visited on the state by Hurricane Matthew, Troxler said.
"There are places you can't even get to," he said. "We may salvage some of the crops when the water gets down. For example, I know people are beginning to dig sweet potatoes. They have no clue if they are going to keep or not once they dig them.
"We had a tremendous amount of peanuts still in the field. I think the school is still out on how it is going to affect them. But I would guess if they had standing water over the top of them, they are probably ruined. The cotton crop is tangled and damaged. We have a tremendous number of soybeans still left in the field. The question is will they sprout and make them useless, or will they dry down and have some value to them for some purpose."
All of that remains a question, as well as mortality, especially in the poultry industry, he said.
Also in question is how the disaster will impact prices at the grocery store, he said.
It could be November or even December before there are any "hard numbers," Troxler said.
Troxler said he has seen a lot of people step forward to do what is for the good of the people and when that happens there will be a good outcome.
It will not be the desired outcome, but it will be a good outcome recovering from a disaster, he said.
One of Troxler's goals is to grow the state's agriculture industry to $100 billion annually by 2020.
"We were at $84 billion from the last figures that came out," he said. "Is this going to take a lick this year? Probably so. But we are going to recover. There is a lot of expansion in agriculture in eastern North Carolina. This going to be a temporary thing. We are going to rebuild even better than we were, and it's going to be OK. I fully believe that, and we are going to work toward that end.
"With all of the failed water structures that we have seen in eastern North Carolina it is going to take a long, long time to rebuild. When I started flying Monday about every thing east of Raleigh was a lake. I saw yesterday (Wednesday) that the water had begun to recede in some of the areas that I had seen Monday, but there is still a tremendous amount of water out there."
Troxler said he saw the small towns of eastern North Carolina completely inundated, people trapped in their houses, roads out, cars that tried to cross standing water stranded.
"I have never seen anything like it," he said. "I was not the commissioner when (Hurricane) Floyd came through, but I read about it and heard about it from friends in eastern North Carolina, but I have seen this, and like I said, it is unimaginable.
"I think the biggest concern right now, we know we have lost many of the crops that were still in the field, but infrastructure is a primary concern. To get to be able to haul feed to livestock operations the roads have got to be passable. So we have to wait in some cases for that."
The state has actually prepared to airlift feed to animal operations if needed using forestry helicopters, Troxler said.
"We hope it doesn't come to that," he said. "But Cherry Research Farm, right next to Goldsboro, we already have had to do that."
Last Wednesday forestry helicopters were used to airlift feed to the farm's cattle and hog facilities, he said.
"This is the time of year when our cows are calving so we are having to put a lot of attention into that," Troxler said. "The hotline (1-866-645-9403) we have set up if people need help, that is what it is for. We are beginning to deal with mortality in the poultry industry.
"We are going to in-house compost the majority of the mortality in the poultry industry, which is the most environmentally friendly way we can handle it. We are working very closely with animal industries to make sure that what we are doing is going to save this industry."
The state will be dealing with the storm's ramifications for some time to come, he said.
One of the things Troxler has observed is soil erosion especially where rivers have overflowed their banks and gotten into fields.
"In some cases this is the second year in a row that we have had a bad crop season in eastern North Carolina," he said. "So we are going to be dealing with some economic problems I am sure. I will be approaching our federal partners to see what we can do with disaster aid.
"If anything can be done, I am going to push for it. The first thing is step by step. Put one foot in front of the other every day, and the first step is to recover and to make sure we are not losing more human lives."
Every division within the Department of Agriculture is in emergency mode in one way or another, Troxler said.
"We are going to be this way for quite some time," he said. "This is not going to be something that we wake up tomorrow and it's over with. It is going to be probably months of recovery if not even longer than that.
"We have just have to hang with it and get everything back to normalcy if we can figure out what normalcy is again."