Gravy · Southern Foodways Alliance

The Long Recovery: Farmers and Hurricane Helene

October 8, 2025·26 min·2 clips

Amy Fiedler found her driveway washed away and the creek within a foot of her house foundation after Helene.

The pumpkins are the first warning. Amy Fiedler says they have never been hard for her to grow, but this year's field at Springhouse Farm is thin, weak, and past saving. She wants to know why. If this is not simple user error but land hurt by Hurricane Helene, the answer will take longer to find. Helene came inland hard. The storm caught the North Carolina high country off guard and did its worst damage in the mountains more than 300 miles from the coast. The episode keeps its focus on farms. Amy's field becomes one way to understand a disaster that did not end when debris was cleared and new crops went in. From a distance, recovery can look neat. At Rhodes Berry Farm in July, blackberries hang bright on trellises and young raspberry plants stand in rows near the streams. The money says otherwise. Nearly 10 months after the storm, Dalton finally gets a federal payment just in time to keep payroll from slipping. State checks come later. Amy receives government payments too, while North Carolina's wider agricultural loss is estimated at nearly $5 billion. Agriculture is the state's largest economic sector, and Rhodes Berry Farm and Springhouse Farm are only two farms among thousands in western North Carolina. Still, people came through for each other. Amy calls the storm's silver lining a recalibration of hardship, where ordinary farm mistakes feel smaller after lives were at stake. Her new measure is plain: if nobody died, the day can still be held together, even when the crop cannot. The episode carries its grief quietly, through a ruined pumpkin field, a close payroll call, and a berry row in sun.

As heard by us

A grounded farm-level account of Hurricane Helene's long tail in western North Carolina agriculture.

Gravy follows Hurricane Helene's long afterlife on two western North Carolina farms, where recovery is measured less by dramatic wreckage than by what the land will and will not do afterward.

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Why you'd press play

Ten months after Helene, Amy Fiedler's pumpkins fit in her palm -- and at the farm down the road, payroll cleared by days.

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