Debby brings more disease and fungi to Sampson crops

After an unusually dry June and an excessively rainy July, Tropical Storm Debby dumping even more rainy and wet weather has only ruined the growing season for Sampson County farmers even more.

“A lot of farmers were already wet to begin with,” noted Zachary Parker, a field crop agent for the NC State Cooperative Extension in Sampson County. “And then, you know I’ve heard some reports of 12 inches on top of that. It’s just, it’s been a little rough.”

Parker said the crop most impacted by the storm was tobacco and that tobacco farmers were “just trying to kind of salvage what they can at this point.”

“They can be close to a 50 percent loss of the total crop throughout the county. Some places look better than others, but across the board it’s kind of rough,” Parker stated.

For corn, Parker mentioned that anything that was left after the drought is now seeing issues with grain quality.

“Because of all the water, there’s disease that’s popping up, ear rot and things like that,” he said. “All the moisture has really brought on a lot of disease and a lot of fungi.”

And farmers are having a hard time combating these issues due to their inability to get into their field with a ground-based sprayer.

Parker said right now the main crops seeing issues beyond tobacco and corn crops are peanuts, soybeans and cotton.

And farmers are feeling the pinch.

“It’s been a tough growing season,” Jarman Sullivan from Sullivan Farms, stated plainly.

For Sullivan Farms, any corn that they grew was pretty much wiped out from the drought in June, so the storm didn’t have much of an impact on that crop. Instead, Sullivan is more worried about the soybeans that were planted.

He said it’s still too early to tell how much the rain has hurt them, but for his farm, at least, he doesn’t have any considered a total loss.

“There’s spots you can see that have turned yellow from where the water was standing. But it’s a little bit too early to say,” he said. “We’ll know more when we get the harvest to kind of see how that’s affecting them.”

Another farmer affected by the unusual growing season weather is Jennifer Daniels from Windy Creek Farms.

Her biggest crops on the farm are tobacco and sweet potatoes, both of which should already be in the middle of harvesting but cannot be reached due to the excess water from Tropical Storm Debby.

On top of not being able to harvest the tobacco or sweet potatoes, she said the tobacco crop is wilting and drowning because there’s too much water in the ground that is not allowing the roots to get the nutrients they need.

“We don’t know about sweet potatoes because we haven’t been able to dig any just yet, but our early potatoes that we usually take to the cannery we’ve not been able to deliver any and we were on target to deliver around the 12th (of August),” Daniels said. “The potatoes have just been underwater, they’ve been saturated. So, we’re not sure how bad the devastation is yet, but I know it’s not good for them to be underwater for, you know, going on 30 days.”

She said the drought in June did not impact her farm as badly compared to the places around it because of the little rain showers they had. But now with the excess rain, it is another story.

Both Sullivan and Daniels agreed that agriculture in Sampson County took a hard hit this season.

“It’s kind of a dim looking time right now,” Sullivan said.

He said prices were already high to get the crops in the ground, and many farmers won’t be making that profit back since they “didn’t get any weather to make a crop.”

Daniels stated that Windy Creek Farm’s biggest help this season is that it doesn’t solely rely on selling crops to make a profit.

“We actually have turkeys and hogs, and that’s the good thing,” she said. “They’ve been doing well lately. But, if it were not for our pigs and our turkeys, it would be a total loss right now.”