First of two parts

SURF CITY – Capt. Ray Brittain wasn’t kidding.

The white PVC pipes he described at a public meeting last April as jutting from waters that hug stretches of banks and fill pockets of bays in the sounds behind Topsail Island are easily in the hundreds, if not thousands.

The pipes signal the locations of shellfish leases in Stump and Topsail sounds, the waters of which have become a hot commodity for shellfish growers shut out from farming in coastal counties north and south of Topsail Island because of temporary and permanent leasing moratoriums.

“We’re not over here hatin’ on anybody,” Brittain said one morning in late May as he stood on the bow of his sleek 22-footer equipped with rods, reels, tackle and other amenities advertised on his fishing guide website. “We don’t own the water. We’re out here sharing it with everyone else.”

Brittain, who owns Spring Tide Guide Service, has been fishing the waters around Topsail Island and the New River for more than 35 years. He’s witnessed firsthand the changes to the barrier island and adjacent mainland areas during that time, where development has exploded on the land and off.

It’s the latter he invited to show North Carolina Coastal Federation Coastal Management Program Director Kerri Allen during a listening session the nonprofit and North Carolina Sea Grant hosted in Surf City on April 14. The meeting was opened to Topsail Island officials, residents, and business owners like Brittain to discuss their experiences with shellfish leases, which have in recent years become contentious as more and more have been permitted.

The Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, will host an informal presentation and listening session for shellfish growers in September.

Allen; Lela Schlenker, the Coastal Federation’s newest coastal advocate; Capt. Mike Oppegaard, owner of Native Son Guide Service out of Hampstead; and this reporter joined Brittain on a warm, sunny mid-weekday morning on his boat for a tour through the sounds.

Our first stop of the tour was at a large bay punctuated by fields of white PVC pipes marking water column shellfish leases where lines of floating cages poke from the water’s surface.

Brittain didn’t hold back his feelings about the pipes, saying he is “sick of explaining” to curious customers why they’re there. Even so, he complimented the grower of the shellfish lease we visited first.

“He actually runs a good operation,” Brittain said. “Nobody’s arguing that. We’re just overrun here.”

Today, nearly 190 shellfish leases are in the waters behind the 26-mile-long barrier island from the New River and its adjacent estuarine waters south to Topsail Sound. The number of water column leases and bottom shellfish leases in Onslow and Pender counties has increased by roughly 46% since 2018.

The rapid expansion of leases, particularly water column leases where gear must float more than 18 inches above the waterbed, has led in recent years to complaints about impacts to the viewsheds of waterfront properties, boating and kayaking access, and infringement on popular fishing spots.

Those mounting complaints from community members and local government officials who serve them have prompted calls for a temporary pause on new shellfish lease permits in waters behind the island.

State Rep. Ted Davis, R-New Hanover, in late April introduced legislation to extend that county’s 2019-imposed shellfish leasing moratorium by another five years through to July 1, 2031. A little more than two weeks after Davis put House Bill 1113 forward, a section was added to the proposed law to temporarily prohibit new shellfish leases “in certain areas” of Pender and Onslow counties.

And, more recently, the Atlantic Beach Town Council adopted a resolution urging the North Carolina General Assembly to extend Bogue Sound’s moratorium on new shellfish leases. That 2019 moratorium is set to expire July 1.

Allen told those who attended the April forum that a pause would give the Coastal Federation and Sea Grant more time to consult with residents, recreational waterway users, and shellfish growers. Their feedback would help shape future policies to protect the industry, secure its long-term sustainability, and resolve user conflicts, she said.

The Coastal Federation and Sea Grant plan are in the process of creating a Geographic Information System, or GIS, database pinpointing areas where leases may or may not be suitable in the waterways behind Topsail Island. That database is anticipated to be published next year.

Like most who’ve vocalized their concerns about the number of shellfish leases that have been permitted in the waters behind the island, Brittain and Oppegaard say they support the shellfish industry.

“Nobody thought through the issues we’re having now,” Oppegaard said. “We’re saturated. The number one issue is density.”

The large schools of drum that used to swim into the bay where Brittain first stopped once easily accommodated a handful of fishing boats at one time, he said.

“You’ll catch a fish here and there, but you don’t see big schools anymore,” he said. “You can’t pressure them so much or they’re going to leave.”

Oppegaard piped in, “I just quit coming in here.”

The men raised numerous questions regarding shellfish leases, including how aquaculture noise and cages impact fish movement, whether the volume of PVC pipes some growers use is necessary, why growers are not required to carry insurance, and whether farming operations can be moved farther away from shorelines.

“You really want the bank,” for fishing, Brittain said as he coasted along the landward side of Permuda Island Reserve, a narrow, roughly 1.5-mile-long undeveloped island in Stump Sound in Onslow County.

“If you look, it’s all leased up,” he said, pointing to rows of floating shellfish cages near portions of the island’s shoreline. “Every point and pocket has stuff on it now. We’re all pushed into tighter places where there’s actually fish. If we can just get some perimeters in place. We’re just overrun here.”

Next in the series: Leaseholders say they’re boxed in.

An Outer Banks nonprofit has a two-day program planned for next weekend that digs into historic and modern-day agricultural practices as part of its mission to honor the indigenous Earth ethic.

The Secotan Alliance … and Beyond’s “In the Spirit of Wingina 3: Seeds of Wisdom and Sustenance,” begins at 9 a.m. Friday, May 29, and continues starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 30, in the Virginia S. Tillett Community Center in Manteo.

There is no charge to attend, but organizers ask those interested in attending to register online through the website. There are also volunteer opportunities listed as well.

Gray Parsons of Frisco is a descendent of the Machapunga-Mattamuskeet, and is president of the Secotan Alliance … and Beyond.

Parsons founded the Outer Banks-based nonprofit in 2023 to honor Chief Wingina and indigenous environmental history. Wingina was chief of the Roanoke-Secotan tribe that inhabited Roanoke Island and the nearby mainland. Wingina established the Secotan Alliance with other village leaders to resist English colonization. The alliance territory included current-day Dare, Hyde, Beaufort, Washington and Tyrrell counties and its inhabitants were of Algonquin culture and spoke what has been called a “Carolina Algonquin” dialect. The chief’s attempt to expand the alliance farther inland resulted in his beheading by the English military in 1586, the website explains.

The mission of the nonprofit “is to educate the public on the traditional indigenous principles of the Secotan Alliance under the leadership of Chief Wingina specifically in terms of their application and value in today’s world…and to educate the public regarding the need and the methods to protect Mother Earth through individual, community, corporate and government actions based on the traditional indigenous earth ethic.”

Parsons explained to Coastal Review that this year’s program is following a similar outline as the first two events, though the focus has changed a bit.

The dual mission doesn’t change, “that will always be paramount, but the focus of how we accomplish that will change from year to year,” Parsons said. The inaugural program in 2024 focused on indigenous environmental history and last year’s program emphasized the unique leadership roles of women.

“This year it’s on Seeds of Wisdom and Sustenance,” Parsons said, and will focus on agricultural patterns with an emphasis on ancient, indigenous agricultural methods on May 29, and modern-day gardening with some connectivity to the ancient on May 30.

The keynote speaker for the two-day event is retired professor Dr. Tom Shields, who will speak Friday morning about the “Images of Sustenance: Writings and the Archaeology of Foodways from the 1580s.”

Shields taught early American and frontier literature, at East Carolina University. His publications focus on the Spanish and English literature of colonial North America, particularly the “Lost Colony” and 17^th century English explorer and writer John Lawson. Shields helped establish the Roanoke Colonies Research Office at ECU in 1993, according to the university.

Shields told to Coastal Review that the first idea that many of us had of what Native American life was like along the Outer Banks in the 1580s came from the John White watercolors and the Theodore de Bry engravings based on those drawings. He referenced the website, Virtual Jamestown, where the watercolors and engravings are indexed and compared.

John White, who was eventually made governor of the “Lost Colony,” was an English artist and cartographer who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his voyage to the Americas in 1585. He was brought along to create a “visual representation of the people, plants, animals and way of life in the New World,” according to the National Park Service. Based in Germany, de Bry engraved a set of plates to illustrate scientist Thomas Harriot’s account of the 1585 journey to the Roanoke colony, “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” published in 1595.

“These were done about the same time that Ralph Lane, governor of the 1585-86 English colony on Roanoke Island, wrote the line promoters of North Carolina still like to use, that this is ‘goodliest soil under the cope of heaven,’” he said, adding it’s just as often given as “the goodliest land under the cope of heaven.”

“Whether ‘soil’ or ‘land,’ the emphasis tends to be agricultural — how well maize (corn) grows, sometimes along with beans and squash, the classic Native American Three Sisters companion planting,” he continued.

“The idea of a North American agricultural paradise created in these works influenced how Europe viewed Native America back then, and it continues to influence how people think of that past even today. The pictures and writings from the 1580s English expeditions are still important primary sources about the Algonquian tribes that lived in the region.”

However, Shields explained, archaeological work along the Outer Banks and “throughout the inland Sound Country of northeastern North Carolina paints a more complex picture. The various Algonquian settlements of the inner and Outer Banks shared a language and culture. At the same time, the foods that dominated people’s diets — an important part of any culture — differed according to where the various settlements were located in the region,”

New to the lineup is North Carolina Extension Master Gardener Cheryl Anby of Manteo. She will speak the second day on “A-Maizing Corn.” Anby is the alliance’s secretary and is of French-Canadian indigenous ancestry.

Parsons said that there are a handful of return speakers this year, including Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, associate professor at George Mason University and Piscataway tribal citizen, will speak about “Gourds and Thunders: A Piscataway Return to the Water.”

Dr. Arwin Smallwood, of Tuscarora descent, is Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at North Carolina Central University, and will present, “War, Enslavement and Migration: The Tuscarora Diaspora and its impact on the Tuscarora Nation 1711 to 1722.”

David Rahahę́·tih Webb, a member of the Tuscarora Indians of Kahtenuaka Territories, will present on “Relational Living: Lifeways Rooted in Responsibility.” The Kahtenuaka Territories include the Roanoke, Neuse, Trent, Tar, Cape Fear and Pee Dee river basins, Lake Mattamuskeet territory, archeological sites and traditionally occupied lands throughout the coastal plains of present-day North Carolina and South Carolina, according to the territories website.

Sara Hallas, education and outreach director for the North Carolina Coastal Federation will give a talk on “Environmental Stewardship: Future Engineers and Innovators.” The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

Her focus has been to bring in public school students who have achieved either recognition or some type of honor within the scope of environmentalism, Parsons explained.

Parsons added that presenter, Sound Rivers Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Katey Zimmerman, will speak about the effects of agricultural runoff into the water in her presentation, “The Impacts of Modern Agriculture on our Rivers and Communities.”

“Because of our geography, because we’re surrounded by water, water will always be part of the theme or the content, but each year, there will be a theme that sort of expands that,” he said.

Last year, organizers brought in the jazz band, the Benjie Porecki Trio, based in the Washington, D.C., area, and invited the band to return this year. The performance is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Friday at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head.

Alliance Board Member Erica Lewis said about this year’s programming that she feels everybody can get something out of the concept of seeds and how it connects with their own family history that of the region.

“People should be able to walk away with newfound information about the parallels of a seed like a native plant in the Outer Banks, and then the seeds of their family,” Lewis said.

NEAR BEAUFORT — Officials wielded ceremonial gold-painted shovels Monday to break ground on an economic development project specifically tailored to the needs of coastal communities, a plan that one advocate likened to successful technology-incubation hubs but instead intended to support shellfish aquaculture jobs.

When construction begins at the recently cleared site this summer, the Shellfish Mariculture Hub will feature a 2,500-square-foot structure on county-owned land next to the boat ramp at Straits Landing, just across from Harkers Island. The building will be outfitted with cold storage, equipment, an outdoor workspace and crucial water access — shared resources for shellfish growers, officials said.

Tom Looney of Wrightsville Beach, a former vice president and general manager of Lenovo North America and a longtime board member with Coastal Review’s publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said he had been involved a decade ago in developing the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, which works to recruit new business, assist existing businesses, help companies with international trade, promote the state as a tourist destination and counsel small companies and startups.   

“Today, it’s the number one workforce engine in the country for the last three out of four years,” Looney said. “We know how to attract businesses. We know how to create new businesses. What I learned in that role was, some of the most economically challenged regions in our state were our coastal communities. We had to find new ways to create jobs for people to feed their families, grow a business, have opportunity.”

Looney, who was an IBM man for more than 30 years, said that, since 2013, North Carolina’s oyster industry has grown more than 500%. Today, the state boasts one of the fastest-growing oyster industries in the country, generating more than $300 million annually.

“And let me tell you, folks, this hub will set it on fire, as far as North Carolina as a state,” Looney said.

That success will be the result of combined forces, including the shellfish aquaculture program at Carteret Community College, and provide a good return on the investments made by the legislature, the county, the Coastal Federation and others, he said. Looney praised Coastal Federation staff, including Chief Program Officer Ana Zivanovic-Nenadovic for shepherding the project.

“We’re doing it the right way. We’re creating jobs while protecting the culture and our coastal waters,” Looney said.

He said the mariculture hub would apply the same principle as American Underground, a Google tech hub for startups in Durham, but with oysters.

Coastal Federation Executive Director Braxton Davis said the hub project was “about putting down roots for an industry that has been proving its worth in eastern North Carolina and across the country for a long time now.”

Shellfish mariculture, Davis said, combines economic opportunity, environmental benefits and a unique cultural heritage in a way that few other industries can.

“It creates jobs, it supports working waterfronts, and it keeps seafood production local, which is fantastic,” Davis said. “And at the same time, our oysters are out there every day, quietly doing their work, cleaning the water, filtering the water, improving clarity and water quality across the coast. So, that all together is a combined return on investment that you rarely find and few industries can match. It’s driving economic growth while actively improving water quality and protecting the coast.”

Also on hand for the event was Sen. Norm Sanderson, R-Pamlico, and who also represents Carteret, Chowan, Halifax, Hyde, Martin, Warren and Washington counties. Sanderson explained how his district has a “very important role to play in our seafood industry,” as producers and consumers. He noted the move to transfer the Division of Marine Fisheries from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality to the Department of Agriculture as part of the Republican-led legislature’s regulatory reform efforts. “Because too many times, it hinders the growth that we could use here on the coast to create jobs and to make our economies more stronger and more prosperous.”

Sanderson described his district’s rankings in the state Department of Commerce economically distressed counties tier system. Under this system, the department ranks the 100 counties’ economic well-being and assigns a corresponding tier number, 1-3. Commerce designates the 40 most distressed counties as Tier 1, the next 40 as Tier 2 and the 20 least distressed as Tier 3.

“I have four counties, five counties that are Tier 1s, which is the most economically distressed counties in the state of North Carolina. And so anything that we can do to help those counties is going to be a blessing,” Sanderson said.

He said the Mariculture Hub was one of the few projects to get legislative support from all corners.

“This one is an easy one to sell, because I think people, first of all, they love seafood,” Sanderson said, adding that he hoped that the project becomes a prototype for others.

“We have over 300 farmers now farming oysters for at least a secondary income. We’re hoping that it will eventually become primary income for them,” he said.

Rep. Celeste Cairns, R-Carteret and Craven, also spoke at the event Monday. She said the project was “a real collaboration among state folks, local folks, and great organizations like the Coastal Federation, and I know I speak for Senator Sanderson as well when I say, when everybody is moving and pulling in the same direction, it is a rare and beautiful thing.”

Cairns said she had been told the total number of leases and franchises was about 500.

“Each of those, whatever the number — it’s a lot and growing — and each of those folks represents a small business or family or an individual trying to make a livelihood on the water.”

The Rocky Mount-based Golden LEAF Foundation, created by the North Carolina General Assembly to award proceeds from the 1998 National Cigarette Manufacturer Settlement Agreement, uses that money to create economic opportunities in rural, tobacco-dependent and poorer counties.

Golden LEAF’s early support and $200,000 in backing in August 2022 helped build momentum for the project. Jason Rochelle evaluates funding proposals for the organization, works to implement Golden LEAF priorities, and oversees project monitoring and compliance.

“At the time, the project represented a strong vision, one rooted in supporting local aquaculture, strengthening coastal economies and creating new opportunities for shellfish growers in the region,” Rochelle said. “Today, it’s incredibly rewarding to see that vision move forward. The shellfish hub is a strategic investment in the future of Carteret County and addresses real needs identified by the shellfish farming community by providing shared infrastructure such as dock access, refrigeration, storage, grading and loading equipment and a central point for distribution. This facility will make a meaningful difference in the day-to-day operations of local growers.”

Rochelle said the hub would serve up to 15 operations and generate around $2 million annually.

“By locating the facilities near the fishing waters, growers will be able to spend more time harvesting, less time on logistics,” Rochelle said. “This increased efficiency will translate to higher production, increased income and the creation of high-quality jobs in this community.”

Assistant Carteret County Manager Matt Reynal said the project reflects “who we are as a county, from Harkers Island to Cedar Island and all across Down East, our connection to the water has always been central to how we live and work. Shellfish mariculture builds on that tradition.”

Reynal said that economic development “isn’t just about bringing in something new or shiny” to Carteret County.

“It’s about supporting the industries that are already here and ensuring that we have the infrastructure to grow,” he said. “That’s why the county was proud to provide this land. We see the long-term value and what this project supports working waterfronts local businesses and innovative opportunity that stays rooted in our communities, and that’s especially important for Down East.”

Chris Matteo, president of the North Carolina Shellfish Growers Association, said that when he was first told of the plan, he “immediately agreed to participate.” He said Coastal Federation founder Todd Miller and Looney had seen a similar model in Australia, and that infrastructure helped fuel a thriving shellfish aquaculture industry there.

“And today we are finally breaking ground on our shared vision. I’m very excited for our local shellfish farmers and for our industry. This is a special day, not just because we are breaking ground on a new building, but because we’re laying the foundation for the next stage of growth in our young industry,” said Matteo. “This project took years of persistence, collaboration and a shared belief that working waterfronts and shellfish mariculture are critically important to North Carolina’s coast.”

The fun part lies ahead, Matteo said.

“This shellfish hub will create job local jobs, support family businesses and keep waterfront communities working on the water. It will do so while helping grow one of the world’s most sustainable and healthy animal proteins, and as if that wasn’t enough, it will also improve our estuaries. Every oyster grown in our waters does more than feed someone. It is filtering water, creating habitat, rebuilding public trust stocks of marine species, and proving that economic growth and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand.”

Matteo said he was especially proud that shellfish farms in North Carolina filter more than 600 million gallons of estuarine water every day.

“This hub will help us grow that number further,” he said. “As a shellfish grower here in North Carolina, I can tell you firsthand, this hub isn’t just a nice to have. It solves real-world problems that growers across the state deal with daily. While shellfish farming has enormous potential, the reality is, starting and scaling a farm is not easy. For many growers, one of the biggest barriers has always been access to waterfront infrastructure.”

For small operations, the costs can be terminal.

“Shellfish farmers haven’t been limited by demand or ability,” Matteo said. “They’ve been limited by not having a place to work on the water, the equipment to process and refrigerate their product and an efficient way to get it to market.”

It’s been nearly a month since a video first aired of Wilmington’s mayor invoking residents to voice their opposition to one town’s plans to pull millions of gallons of water daily from the Cape Fear River.

“Today this vital resource is under threat from growing water-hungry communities upstream,” Mayor Bill Saffo says in the clip as he stands along the city’s downtown Riverwalk.

Fuquay-Varina, a town about 30 miles south of Raleigh, wants to move more than 6 million gallons of water each day from the Cape Fear River to the Neuse River, he explains in the video made in collaboration with the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority.

“That’s 6 million gallons gone, each day, forever. It is important that you make your voice heard now for your family and for future generations. Add your voice to those of your neighbors and friends who already are telling the state to say no to Fuquay-Varina’s permanent taking of our water,” Saffo concludes.

Only a couple of more weeks are left until the public comment period on Fuquay-Varina’s request for an interbasin transfer, or IBT, certificate closes.

Maya Holcomb, a Division of Water Resources representative, told members of the state Environmental Management Commission’s Water Allocation Committee last week that she anticipated receiving comments all the way through to the April 1 deadline.

In her presentation to the committee Thursday, Holcomb provided an update on the numbers of correspondence she’d received in the days since she initially crafted her report, when the email count was at 283.

Related: Opponents say river water transfer puts Cape Fear in peril

“But I just keep getting so many emails, which — we’re hearing from the public, that’s great — but I have received an additional 42 emails since this PowerPoint was created last week,” Holcomb said.

Holcomb said she had also received 41 resolutions from cities, towns, counties, homebuilders, substations and public utilities.

She did not say how many of those resolutions oppose the IBT, but instead highlighted what she described as the “newest” issues of concern: loss of water for agricultural purposes, nutrient concentration in the Neuse River Basin, such as those that cause algal blooms, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, hypoxia, drought vulnerability and chemical export of industrial pollutants from the Cape Fear River.

Those concerns mirror some of arguments made by dozens of people who spoke out against the transfer during a series of state-hosted public hearings in December.

Fuquay-Varina projects that the water supply, from which it currently buys from Raleigh and Harnett and Johnston counties, will fall short of demand by 2030.

Under the proposed preferred alternative identified in a draft environmental impact statement for the transfer, Fuquay-Varina would source its entire water supply from a water treatment plant in Sanford, which is in the Cape Fear River Basin.

Once water pulled from the Cape Fear River is used by residents and businesses in that town, the treated wastewater would then be discharged into the Neuse River Basin.

This would permanently subtract 6.17 million gallons each day from the river flow that currently serves about 900,000 residents of counties, cities, towns and communities from Fayetteville to Wilmington.

“Put in perspective, 6.17 (million gallons per day) of raw water from the river is enough to provide treated drinking water to more than 27,000 homes,” according to Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s website.

In the weeks and months leading up to CFPUA’s campaign against Fuquay-Varina’s plan, several local governments and utilities adopted resolutions and sent letters of opposition to the state.

New Hanover County, Wilmington and Brunswick County and more than a dozen Brunswick County municipalities have officially gone on record opposing Fuquay-Varina’s request.

Holcomb explained last week that, after April 1, state environmental officials will respond to comments on the draft environmental impact statement and then formulate a hearing officers’ report, which will be finalized sometime between July and September.

After that, the Environmental Management Commission will determine whether the EIS is technically adequate. Following that determination, the Department of Environmental Quality will issue its record of decision.

Another round of public hearings will be held before the EMC makes its final determination.

If approved, the transfer would occur after 2031, according to the draft impact statement.

Comments may be submitted to Maya Holcomb, Division of Water Resources, 512 N. Salisbury St., Raleigh, NC, 27604, or by email to maya.holcomb@deq.nc.gov.

TYNER – As neighborhood businesses go, Timbermill Wind is quiet, clean and visually striking. And barely a year from the start of its wind energy production in this rural northeastern North Carolina community, it is already pumping money into local coffers.

At a ceremony held Tuesday at the site of the project’s local operations, Ken Young, CEO of Apex Clean Energy, the operation’s owner, presented a large, ceremonial check representing about $750,000 in net tax payments to Chowan County.

“There’ll be many more like it,” Bob Kirby, a Chowan County commissioner, told a small gathering of local officials and community members.

According to a Timbermill Wind press release, annual payments to the county over the project’s 30-year lifespan are expected to total about $50 million, which will support community needs such as education and emergency services. The infusion of revenue, so far, makes Timbermill the county’s single largest taxpayer, officials said, equaling more in property taxes this year than last year’s top nine taxpayers combined.

With the silver blades of a turbine turning slowly in the background over his shoulder, Kirby couldn’t help boasting that the land-based wind facility was the first of its kind to be permitted in North Carolina.

“There’s a $400 million investment that’s sitting behind me,” he said.

Beyond the benefits to the county and state, Kirby added, Timbermill is also a huge help to local farmers who receive annual payments — the amount is deemed proprietary information — to lease their land to the business.

“The people who own these farms are under unbelievable stress to their way of life,” he said. “For the leaseholders, this sort of thing, that’s a predictable source of income for them.”

While farmers lose access to a small amount of their land, they can continue as usual to farm the land under the turbines.

During a tour of part of the production site, Richard Bunch, a local representative for Timbermill, while standing in front of a turbine, told the group that farmers are able to get relatively close to the side of the tower when they’re working the land, although they can get closer after the corn or other crops is harvested. 

“He’s going to lose a half an acre here, that’s all,” Bunch said.  “And he’ll have income for 30 years.”   

A 6,000-acre tract, bordered by tall trees and owned by timber company Weyerhaeuser, was the first site to be cleared for the project, said Win Dale, a project representative for Timbermill.

“Once they cut every tree down, every stump was removed,” he said, waving toward a large circle of open land surrounding a turbine.

Each “crane pad” at the 45 sites, he said, is an eighth of an acre.

Hunters now have new access roads to the area, where they hunt mostly for deer, as well as some bear and wild turkey, Bunch said.

“They rented this whole tract from Weyerhaeuser to hunt,” he said, adding that he’d heard that they’re quite happy with the change. “Between a company and a hunting group, to be able to say that — that never happens.”

Farmers are also enjoying the easier access to their land, Dale added.

“The roads are like interstates compared to what they were before,” he said.

The towers themselves are 345 feet tall. Counting to the tip of the blades — the project has a total of 135 — each “windmill” is 591 feet tall. Providing a short lesson for visitors, Tyler Finley, facility manager for Timbermill Wind, explained that each tower is divided into five sections. Inside, there’s a ladder running up the middle with a platform at each level. The three blades are attached before they’re elevated to the top. 

“It’s kind of like building a very big Lego,” he said about the assembly process.

When they’re moving, the 242-foot-long blades create a 4-acre sweep area. Shadow flickers that would otherwise pass over homes are mitigated by siting towers away from residential structures.

Finley and other Timbermill representatives said that the blades, which are a composite of fiberglass with an interior metal structure, don’t kick on until the wind reaches at least 7 mph, and they’re capable of pitching from zero to 90 degrees. When winds reach about 50 mph, they’ll flatten to reduce surface area. Feathering of blade pitch provides “aerodynamic braking,” and trailing-edge serrations on the blades help reduce noise.

From the onsite substation, a 6-mile line is connected directly to the Dominion Energy “point of intersection,” Finley explained.

Apex has a power purchase agreement with Google, meaning it provides Google with a portion of the power produced at Timbermill. But the power is obtained from the grid, which collects energy from numerous sources.

“It’s an integrated power market,” Finley said.

Simply put, the energy produced by the wind turbines is eventually sent to a large distribution network, where it is purchased by different customers. The concept is similar to global oil and gas markets, where the location of the energy source is rarely the direct recipient of that energy.

 According to Timbermill, the 189-megawatt wind energy project developed and operated by Charlottesville, Virginia-based Apex Clean Energy generates enough clean energy to power the equivalent of 47,000 U.S. homes.

Timbermill, which came online in Dec. 2024, became the second industrial scale land-based wind farm in the state.

Although it was permitted earlier, numerous delays led to it being behind the 104-turbine Amazon Wind U.S. East wind farm that straddles Perquimans and Pasquotank counties and that started its 208-megawatt operation in early 2017.

The Apex Community Grant Program has awarded more than $120,000 for local nonprofits and support for regional reforestation and other community conservation projects.

Speaking after the event, John Mitchener, 84, a native of Chowan County who had served as commissioner from 2010 to 2018, said he was on the board when “the significant decisions” were made about permitting the wind farm.

He noted that opinions initially seemed to be divided between the folks in the Yeopim area, who reside south of Edenton toward the Outer Banks, and the other side of the county.

“The people who objected the most lived down there, and the people who lived up there objected the least,” he said.

While Mitchener said he couldn’t pinpoint the reason for the differences, he said that he knew it was important to maintain a polite and civil approach.

“Part of my outlook as a public official,” he said, “is to try to have the conversation where you could come back to it.”

And as it turns out, he said, people in the community all seem pretty happy now with Timbermill.

Updated at 8 a.m. Thursday to include the link to the Federal Register, which published the proposed rules Thursday after the story posted, and public comment information.

The two federal agencies with jurisdiction over navigable waterways have published amendments to the existing “waters of the United States” rule that they say will “establish a clear, durable, common-sense definition” of the term, and a public comment period has opened.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Army’s changes have heightened worry among conservation groups that federal protections for isolated wetlands might be weakened further than they were soon after the 2023 Supreme Court decision that found wetlands must be connected by surface water to a navigable body of water to fall under the 1972 Clean Water Act.

The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers said in a release Monday that the newly proposed changes were to “fully implement the court’s direction by focusing on relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water—such as streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes—and wetlands that are connected and indistinguishable from such waterbodies.”

As part of the announcement, leadership posted the prepublication notice they planned to submit to the Federal Register, which was published Thursday, starting a 45-day public comment period.

Comments must be submitted by Jan. 5, 2026, and identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, through www.regulations.gov, by email to OW-Docket@epa.gov, or mail to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20460.

Language in the Clean Water Act states that the “term ‘navigable waters’ means the waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.” However, the act doesn’t define what “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, actually are, leaving the EPA and Corps to determine the geographic scope of the rule.

Over the last five decades, pushback and litigation have forced the two agencies to revise the definition several times.

The current regulatory definition, according to the EPA, was put in place in September 2023 to align with the May 2023 Supreme Court ruling on the Sackett v EPA lawsuit.

The Sacketts filed the lawsuit after the agency ordered the Idaho couple to restore where they had begun backfilling with dirt the section of their property that the EPA considered to be wetlands of a nearby navigable waterbody. The judges sided with the Sacketts that federally protected wetlands must have an obvious connection to waterbodies like streams, oceans, rivers and lakes.

To conform to the Sackett decision, the EPA and Army amended in September 2023 the latest final rule, which had been put in place that January.

EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin and Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle shared with Washington, D.C., lawmakers Monday afternoon an overview of the proposed rules.

“I know that across the country, news of today’s proposal is going to be met with a lot of relief and happiness from farmers, ranchers, other landowners, governments that have been looking for a simple, prescriptive definition that the whole country can operate off of, and would allow individuals to know whether or not there’s a ‘water of the United States’ without having to go hire an attorney or a consultant, having to pay someone to Tell them,” Zeldin said Monday during the announcement livestreamed on the EPA’s YouTube.

The EPA secretary explained that the proposal “includes practical, common-sense revisions that will make a real difference,” and adds definitions for what he called “key terms” such as “’relatively permanent,’ ‘continuous surface connection’ and ‘tributary’ to appropriately limit the scope of what is consistent with” the Sackett case.

“We’re establishing that jurisdictional tributaries must connect to traditional navigable waters, either directly or through other features that provide predictable and consistent flow. We’re adding a new exclusion for groundwater and revising exclusions for certain ditches prior converted cropland and waste treatment systems,” Zeldin continued. “We’re incorporating locally familiar terminology such as wet season to help determine whether a water body qualifies as WOTUS. And we’re strengthening state and tribal decision-making authority by providing clear regulatory guidelines while recognizing their expertise in local land and water resources.”

He explained that the proposed rules were developed based on input from multiple sources, including preproposal recommendations, docket information from nine public listening sessions and consultation comments from states, tribes and local governments.

Telle addressed the audience after Zeldin.

“Since 1972 Americans have struggled to understand what Congress meant when it included the term ‘waters of the United States’ in the Clean Water Act. Did it apply to them? Did it not? The definition of that term has been often abused, sometimes stretched beyond recognition over time, and it’s left Americans uncertain about whether they were complying with the Clean Water Act or not,” he said Monday, adding that “under President Trump’s leadership, the EPA and army Civil Works, which oversees the Corps of Engineers, are kicking off the formal process that will give American certainty about their property once and for all.”

Several Republican officials thanked Zeldin from the podium for initiating the proposed amendments including West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey who said that “for too long there’s been great deal of uncertainty” about the WOTUS rule.

“Unfortunately, it left many people holding the bag. Farmers, contractors, small business owners guessing whether their ephemeral stream or a backyard ditch was going to be classified as a waters of the United States rule and potentially subject them to significant penalties,” he continued.

Alabama Congressman Gary Palmer said he was confident that the rule will prioritize clean water while protecting farmers, ranchers, landowners and businesses alike.

Conservation groups have been vocal about these revisions opening up isolated wetlands to development and degradation since the announcement was made.

“Wetlands are the lifeblood of our coast, and should be held to the highest standards of protection,” North Carolina Coastal Federation Coastal Advocate Kerri Allen explained. “The wetlands most impacted by these proposed rollbacks are the very wetlands that hold water during storms and help protect downstream waters. With the proposed changes, our coast will face irrevocable damage that impacts not only our wildlife and fisheries, but also our coastal economy and communities.” The Coastal Federation publishes Coastal Review.

Southern Environmental Law Center Senior Attorney Mark Sabath said Monday in a statement that this proposed rule, if adopted, “could have catastrophic ramifications for communities already plagued by flooding, water quality concerns, and drinking water shortages. After critical, longstanding protections for clean water and wetlands were drastically narrowed by the Sackett decision, we need stronger protections, not weaker, to safeguard our communities and environment.”

League of Conservation Voters Healthy Communities Program Director Madeleine Foote had a similar reaction.

“The Trump administration’s Polluted Water Rule is another blatant giveaway to big corporate polluters that will jeopardize the waters that our families and communities rely on for drinking, recreation, and fueling our local economies,” Foote said.

“In 2023, the Supreme Court’s devastating Sackett decision stripped federal protections from millions of miles of streams and tens of millions of acres of wetlands, and now corporate polluters are pushing their friends in the administration to go even further in decimating our clean water safeguards. They won’t be happy until the Clean Water Act is nothing more than words on a page and they can pollute our waters with abandon,” Foote continued.

Environmental Defense Fund Associate Vice President Will McDow stated Monday that the new proposed WOTUS rule from the Trump administration that will redefine which wetlands and waters have Clean Water Act Protections. 

“We already spend billions annually responding to disasters that were created by building in risky areas. With today’s proposed WOTUS rule, commercial developers will be allowed to pave over wetlands to build unsafe housing that either floods or increases flooding to neighbors,” he continued. “This rule brings tremendous uncertainty and risk to our nation’s drinking water, flood protections and critical habitats. Based on our peer-reviewed analysis, new requirements for wetland protections could leave nearly all wetlands without Clean Water Act protections. Requirements in the new rule are not based in science, difficult to implement in practice and will create a dangerous lack of clarity.” 

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A calf lies in a field of spring flowers near the Haystacks area of Morehead City in Carteret County. Photo: Dylan Ray

Carteret had 22 farms raising cattle and calves mostly for beef production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2022 county-by-county farm census, up by three from the 2017 count. The 2022 figure accounted for about 400 head of cattle.

Among coastal counties, Onslow leads in the number of cattle farms with 84 and about 1,900 head in 2022, down from 95 farms and nearly 2,100 head in 2017.

North Carolina had nearly 15,000 cattle farms in 2022 with just shy of 719,000 head, down from more than 18,000 farms and more than 776,000 cattle in 2017, but numbers rebounded last year to about 750,000 head, according to a 2024 USDA document.

By comparison, the state held steady at around 2,400 hog farms during the 2017-25 period, but the hog inventory during the 2022 census had decreased by about 700,000 from about 8.9 million in 2017.

About 32.3 million hogs were sold in 2022, compared to just over 11,300 cattle and calves sold that year.

As anybody raised in the South knows — or anyone who’s worked in tobacco, or even driven past a field of it — tobacco blooms are usually pink or white.

Not so much anymore, but once upon a time, tobacco was an invaluable cash crop around here. Tobacco has been an important crop for thousands of years.

Ever wonder what tobacco looked like 2,000 years ago?

Before we delve into that, think about tobacco seeds. More like dust than what we think of as actual seeds. Tobacco seeds are tiny. Tinier even than mustard seeds.

The best way to preserve seeds is to freeze them, because heat and humidity destroy seed viability. Seeds have no idea whether they’ve been frozen for five minutes or 500 years, which is why we have seed vaults like Svalbard, set into the side of a glacial mountain on an archipelago above Norway. Or the Millennium Seed Bank Project in the United Kingdom. There are several in the U.S., as well as others all over the world.

While most of those are climate-controlled fortresses, many individuals also save seeds.

The Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa is the largest nongovernmental seed bank of its kind. The SSE, by growing select varieties of their heirloom and open-pollinated seeds and then saving new seeds, called regenerating, can not only keep the seeds in their bank fresh, they are able to share them with gardeners around the nation. They also send backup seeds to Svalbard.

Why is it important to save seeds, especially when one can just go to the store or online and order more any time one needs them? Right?

Humans have been saving seeds for as long as there have been farming humans. Over countless centuries different regions have developed varieties that thrive in their specific area. Seeds are also easy to carry, so sharing, or transporting them if one has to move, is fairly effortless.

Oftentimes, seeds were passed down from generation to generation, as treasured heirlooms. As long as families had a few seeds, they were pretty much assured food for the coming seasons. One seed usually produces one plant, but that single plant can produce innumerable seeds.

Seeds are expert hitchhikers. Whether windblown, or carried by water, or in the gullet of some critter, or stuck to the paw or pelt of an animal, seeds do what they’re supposed to do … disperse over as wide an area as possible in order to insure the continuation of their species.

Modern man has engineered seeds to come up all at the same time and to be uniform in growth in order to get the most out of crops. Left alone, seeds germinate randomly, with some sprouting and coming up now, some in a bit, and some quite a bit later. In some cases, even years or decades apart, just in case there’s a late frost, or a flood, or a drought, or a plague of insects, or any one of a hundred other reasons why they might not thrive at that particular time.

Estimates say we, as humans, have lost 75% of our seed diversity in recent times. Why is that important? Instead of having X number of types of … wheat, for instance, we’ve become dependent on just a few types to sustain us. Types that yield more, or are easier to grow, or are just plain better looking. That’s all well and good until something happens to eliminate those few types and suddenly, there’s no way to grow … wheat.

Which is why seed banks are invaluable. Not only do they ensure genetic diversity, they are also a safeguard in case of tragedy, war, wildfires, or any other disaster, man-made or natural.

Heirloom, or open-pollinated, means seeds grown from those plants can be saved and used the following year, and from those seeds you will get the exact fruit or vegetable you grew last year.

Hybrid seeds have different parents, and while you can usually save the seeds and grow them, you will get one or the other of the parents instead of whatever you got the seeds from.

Why choose open-pollinated over hybrid?

Often, hybrid seeds were developed to ensure larger crops, more disease resistance, more insect resistance and longer-bearing seasons.

Open-pollinated, as the name implies, are just that. In order to keep the variety you’re striving for, conditions have to be met or the heirlooms will create their own hybrids, which is where new varieties originate. Other crops in the same family need to be far enough away that the bees and wind won’t cross-pollinate them. The crops have to be grown long enough to let the seeds mature, and then they must be harvested and saved.

Circling back around to the original question about 2,000-year-old tobacco, and why saving seeds is important: Around 20 years ago, a longtime customer came into the independent garden center where I work and have worked for decades. He asked me if I would plant some special seeds for him. I said, “Sure.”

This gentleman went on to explain that a friend of his had been caving in Kentucky. The friend found a pottery jar full of tobacco seeds. The pottery jar was dated to …

… Two. Thousand. Years. Old.

Showing me the pinch of seeds he’d been gifted, my friend offered them to me.

More than willing to try, I didn’t think the seeds would be viable after all that time, and I explained to the gentleman about saving seeds and the odds of them being anything more than old dust. We agreed to plant them and see, with no expectations and only the faintest hope our experiment would work.

To our surprise and delight, the seeds sprouted!

We grew it up, and he harvested both leaves and seeds. This gentleman is big in the Cherokee Nation, and since the cave was on Tribal lands, the tobacco belongs to the Cherokee Nation. My friend gifted it back to the Cherokee, and they use it in their ceremonies all up and down the East Coast!

Instead of being the large-leafed, flue-cured variety we’re used to seeing, the ancient tobacco is a burley type, about 18 inches tall. The blooms are chartreuse and look like little bells.

The Cherokee have a long tradition of saving seeds, as evidenced by the seed in that pottery jar. In fact, in 2020, the Cherokee Nation became the first Indigenous group from North America to send seeds to Svalbard — the seeds of nine heirloom food crops that have been grown by the Cherokee since before the Europeans arrived.

EDENTON — No ribbon-cutting or silver shovels wielded by a few politicians would represent the scale of North Carolina’s second land-based wind energy operation. Instead, Apex Clean Energy invited hundreds of community members, landowners and government officials to join them Wednesday morning on Chowan County farmland to a sign a prone, 242-foot-long silver turbine blade to kick off Timbermill Wind, a project to generate 189 megawatts of electricity with 45 three-bladed turbines.

After being shuttled in buses to the 6,300-acre site from Edenton United Methodist Church, where a breakfast event was held, folks lined up, chatting amiably while waiting to scribble their names on the blade.

First up, a man in a slate-blue suit and green tie strode up to the blade with a fat blue marking pen in his right hand. Reaching up while contractors watched, he wrote his name in large, looping cursive letters: Roy Cooper. Then, under his name he added “governor” and turned to the crowd, grinning widely. Everyone cheered and the signing commenced. Before long, about 250 different signatures covered the length of the blade.

One name, Sadie B. Eure, stood out just to the right of Cooper’s signature. That’s his mother-in-law’s name, said Donald “Randy” Park, pointing at the blade.

Eure and her late husband, Garland, who had three daughters, operated Eure Seed Farms in Perquimans County, Park said. Sadie Eure owns 300 hundred acres at the Timbermill site and has a lease agreement with the company for the turbines on her land.

Park, a retired farmer who lives in Belhaven, said that most of the farmers who grow crops such as soybeans, corn, cotton or wheat at the site are pleased with the project because they can still farm around the turbines, while also collecting regular payments.

“The majority are,” he said. “There are a few that are unhappy.”

Some don’t like the way the turbines look, he said.

“I don’t think they’re an eyesore,” Park said. And the payments enable farmers to be profitable, especially when the weather is not cooperating.

Eure, who is 93, started leasing her land to Apex about 8 to 10 years ago, Park said, collecting $1,587 a month. He doesn’t know what the monthly rent will be once the facility is operational, “But it’ll be a whole lot more than that.”

“It helps to have an extra income,” he said. “She’ll be passing this on to her heirs, too.”

Chowan County has also benefited from the project and will continue to for its operational life, which is expected to be about 30 years.

“We are in effect greatly expanding our tax base in one fell swoop,” Gene Jordan, chair of the Chowan County Board of Education, told the audience at the earlier event at the Edenton church.

Jordan, who is a farmer, said that the wind energy helps diversify their resources while supporting the community and the landowners.

“My family will be able to host seven turbines,” he said. “I’m optimistic we will be able to farm for years to come.”

In addition to creating 200 jobs and generating about $25 million spent with North Carolina businesses during its construction, the project is expected to provide up to $33 million in tax revenue over its lifetime.

The project, delayed by numerous glitches including the COVID-19 pandemic, took 11 years to complete, which Apex CEO Ken Young said is about twice the time it typically takes to build a large wind farm.

“It’s coming back to life,” he said, comparing it to a cat’s nine lives.

Sprinkling his description of the project during his speech at the church with words like “fortitude” and “blood, sweat and tears,” Young credited his team and its partners. “That spirit and dedication is why we’re here today with a $500 million facility, fully developed, financed and well under construction,” he told the audience.

Apex will own and operate the facility when it is completed later this year, the company said in a press release. Last year, Timbermill announced a power-purchase agreement with Google, which will contribute to the clean energy needs to offset energy usage at its data centers.

“Google is buying the output from this project,” Young clarified in a later interview.

Most of the project’s difficulties, besides the pandemic, were to be expected, said Richard Bunch, Apex project representative and retired director of the Edenton-Chowan Chamber of Commerce. “It was all permitting issues,” he said, adding that there were lots of discussions with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. military that were worked through.

But whatever the bumps in the road, Bunch said Timbermill Wind is an asset for the county.

“It’s tremendous,” he said in an interview after the signing. “The occupancy tax this year is probably going to its highest ever,” he said, citing revenue related to construction. “Fuel sales, rooms, food — it just goes on and on.”

Even after the project is completed, Bunch said there will six or seven full-time staff employed locally by Timbermill.

Dr. Ellis Lawrence, who has served on the Chowan County Board of Commissioners for 14 years, said after the signing that the revenue created by the project is already being reflected in the county’s plan to build a new high school. And the county’s tax base will continue to have an annual infusion of $1.3 million from the project.

“We have watched it go full circle,” he said. “We have dealt with the ups and downs.”

In the beginning, a lot of people were calling in opposition, he said. But now most residents seem to have come around to be in favor of it.

“I was there when it started. I’ve heard it all,” he said. “In the beginning, they were talking about the bird killings, the noise that it would make. This is nothing like that. And the science is behind it. It’s more efficient. This is an alternate source of energy and we need to take advantage of it.”

Cooper applauded local, state and federal efforts working together for the success of the project.

 “When you talk about clean energy, a lot of times people think about climate change,” he said at the church event. “But what it’s really about is great-paying jobs and a cleaner environment.”

The state is advising the public to avoid fishing and recreational activity along a portion of Swift Creek in Craven County because of an animal waste spill in the area.

The Department of Environmental Quality Division of Water Resources staff were alerted Tuesday to animal waste in ditches from an unknown source, which was later identified as St. John Farm, permit number AWS25006, at 320 St. John Road in Grifton.

The swine farm has a capacity of about 2,450 hogs with a little more than 1,860 as of a routine state visit April 19 for a compliance inspection. That report noted evidence of incorrect land application, “outside the crop window” for soybeans. It also found that soil analysis recordkeeping was inadequate.

The state attributed the discharge to over-application of animal waste, resulting in run-off that migrated off-site to surface waters. The incident remains under investigation, including the amount discharged and the cause, and any necessary corrective actions to be undertaken, officials said.

Residents are advised to avoid any contact with the water in Swift Creek from Honolulu Road to N.C. Highway 118 west of Vanceboro. Swift Creek flows into the Neuse River near New Bern.

The division said it would continue to monitor water quality in the area. Files related to the facility can be viewed online.

For the first time in nearly six months, all 100 North Carolina counties are drought-free.

While the vast majority of coastal counties are in the black, one remains “abnormally dry” along with handful of western counties, according to the Drought Management Advisory Council.

Those include: Dare, Cherokee, Clay, Graham and Macon counties.

And Council Chair Klaus Albertin warns that eastern counties are potentially at the threshold of slipping back into drought status.

“The western tip keeps improving, but in eastern North Carolina, we’ve seen the Albemarle Sound slowly getting worse,” Albertin stated. “The whole coastal plain has missed out on many of these big rain events, so we are keeping a close eye on that area.”

El Niño, a climate pattern that typically brings cool, wet weather, resulted in heavier storms from the west. But Albertin said in a release that that pattern isn’t expected to stick around.

“We are starting to see dry conditions creep into eastern North Carolina,” he said.

The state as a whole has not been free of drought since Aug. 8, 2023.

According to the State Climate Office, the state experienced drought 24 weeks in a row with the most severe impacts being felt in western North Carolina.

“We had a number of systems going into voluntary water conservation, elevated wildfire risk linked to the dry conditions, and impacts to wildlife habitat from low water levels,” Albertin said.

Each Thursday, the council updates its drought map.

The council consists of drought experts who meet weekly from various government agencies in North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina.

The council is organized by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources. It submits drought condition recommendations to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Drought Mitigation Center.

A map of U.S. drought conditions is available at http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/.

Despite being recently ranked as the state with the seventh-worst feral hog problem in the country, most North Carolinians aren’t likely to spot them feasting on crops in the Piedmont, eating away mussel mounds in coastal salt marshes, or devouring rare, native species of small animals in the mountains.

Compiled data in a recent report released by Captain Experiences, an online platform for hunting and fishing excursions, places North Carolina among the top 10 states with the largest feral hog populations.

In that account, the number of feral hog reports in North Carolina topped 655.

But those numbers are well below the wild boar count tallied in the state this year by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 19, 1,612 feral swine were killed and subsequently sampled to monitor for disease.

The reality is, state officials say, there is not a solid estimate of how many of these free-roaming, highly intelligent, disease-carrying animals are in the state.

And there is no way for state officials to monitor feral swine populations.

Not yet anyway.

Elusive and evasive

The Southeast has long had the biggest, most expensive, and most historic feral swine populations in the country.

North Carolina has had free-ranging populations of swine since the early 1500s, when Spanish conquistadors released their version of domestic pigs into the wild, said Falyn Owens, state Wildlife Resources Commission extension wildlife biologist.

“That’s not to say that the problem hasn’t gotten worse,” she said.

And officials simply do not have a good idea of how widespread the population of feral swine are in the state.

“We don’t in North Carolina have a good estimate of the population of feral swine across the state because it’s a really, really hard number to pin down,” Owens said.

In no area of the state is this challenge more prevalent than the coastal region.

The reason for that is twofold. There are fewer people who reside in remote coastal areas where wild hogs are likely live and leave evidence of their destruction.

In addition, a particular type of hunting popular in the coastal region keeps wild hogs on the move twice as frequently in coastal areas as compared to the Piedmont or mountains, said Wildlife-Livestock Health Director Aaron Loucks with the state agriculture department’s veterinary division.

“When you have dog hunting around feral swine and you’re trying to do any population mapping at all, or any disease monitoring at all, it becomes extremely difficult because those pigs are being moved around so much,” he said. “So, the ability to count populations of pigs on the coast, specifically North Carolina, becomes very difficult with that aspect of their management.”

That’s bad not only for property owners, but salt marshes, according to the results of a 2021 study that found destruction caused by feral hogs in salt marshes affect a marsh’s ability to recover from drought and sea level rise.

Feral hogs are omnivores, feasting on “pretty much anything that is organic,” Owens said.

They forage for everything from invertebrates to nuts, berries and seeds, though they’re just as happy eating small animals and decaying flesh off animal carcasses.

Their hair-covered bodies can weigh hundreds of pounds, but typically weigh between 100 and 200 pounds.

Feral hogs, though very capable of defending themselves if cornered, are averse to coming too close to humans, Owens said.

“Usually, if there’s pigs around, you’re not even going to see them or you’re going to see them on the other side of a field, and you’re just going to see the tail-end of them as they’re running away. They do not want to interact with us,” she said.

And they are “disturbingly intelligent,” Loucks said, adding that the animals are keenly aware when something happens within their social group.

Their innate aversion to risk keeps them on high alert. Unlike other animals who may, for example, stop to nibble on a bait pile of corn, feral hogs appear to suspect a human ploy.

Population and disease management

This year, feral hogs have caused more than $1 million in damage to crops and farms in the state, according to Loucks.

“That damage number is significant because a biologist physically walked that land with the damage,” he said in an email. “It was recorded and verified on the ground alongside a farmer.”

Two of the crops suffering the most destruction have been soy and corn. In some cases, Loucks said, farmers this year have quit growing one or both of those crops altogether.

Not only are feral swine destructive to agriculture, waterways and coastal resilience, they can carry a host of diseases that can spread to other animals, including livestock.

When that happens, it can have devastating effects on the livestock market and its producers, costing billions of dollars in losses nationwide.

Females can birth up to five litters every two years. Each litter typically includes between four and six piglets, though some females can give birth to up to 12 piglets, Owens said.

Killing them off one-by-one isn’t going to control their populations.

“There’s never been a country or a state ever that has hunted their way out of the problem,” Loucks said. “You might kill a few, but the rest of them are going to disperse on your neighbor’s land, cause damage for a few years, and then come back, and now they’re significantly more educated so it makes this problem just exponentially harder to control.”

Instead, agencies have turned to the use of corral traps, which can be set up to capture whole social groups of feral swine. Once captured, the hogs are shot.

It is illegal in North Carolina to release swine into the wild.

Yet feral hogs continue to be transported into the state illegally for sport hunting, a lucrative business.

These so-called illegal sport translocations put “a lot of farms at risk that wouldn’t necessarily be in that spot,” Loucks said.

But there is good news.

“The need is exponentially increasing every year to handle feral swine as a state, and that need will translate to less and less illegal sport translocations,” Loucks said.

The agriculture department is currently working on way to monitor feral swine populations through a mapping system, one that will identify populations with a minimum of 100 breeding females.

About 20% of the mapping has been completed.

“The overall consensus is: We have a lot of pigs in less places than we thought,” Loucks said. “We thought it was this widespread, 100-county problem, and it turns out it’s really not. It’s a few focal areas.”

At the beginning of this year, the state changed how it operates a program aimed at helping property owners capture feral pigs on their property by bolstering education and communication with landowners.

What began as a corral-trapping program for six counties has expanded statewide.

The state works with landowners to write out formal management plans and sets up corral traps for property owners having a problem with feral hogs on their land. All that is asked of a property owner is to provide corn to place inside a trap.

“We have traps set up in 15 counties that are active and another 33 counties with population monitoring efforts,” Loucks said in an email. “More traps have been purchased, gone out to private lands, and reduced the population of feral swine in those high-risk areas.”

And it doesn’t stop at the state level. Counties and individual states are communicating more often and more than ever following the 2020 shutdown resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of the entities doing serious disease work around the world started sharing what’s working, and more importantly, what is not working in terms of their disease monitoring,” Loucks said. “All of our management has to be disease-focused so we can be prepared. At this point we have a very much winning formula and it’s because everybody’s involved.”

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Sunflowers are in full bloom at the Trask Family Farms Sunflower Maze at 3650 Blue Clay Road in Castle Hayne. Tickets are required to walk the 9-acre maze. Photo: Mark Courtney

Last in a series on pollinators.

KITTY HAWK — Denise Deacon inspects her bees. This year she only has one hive, although in years past she has had more — as many as eight.

She gently pries the lid off and points to the dark brown resin that lines the top of the inside of the hive.

“That’s the propolis,” she says, explaining that it’s resin the bees collect from trees and other plants that they use to weatherproof the hive.

She slides a frame out and looks at it critically. It’s still early in the season for honey production — they’ll get around to that later in the summer. Right now, the bees are concentrating on foraging for food, building the hive and reproduction.

The bees in this frame have been working on the honeycomb for some time and the comb fills almost the entire frame.

She pulls out another frame and in this frame the honeycomb is clearly a work in progress, the comb filling perhaps a third of the frame. Each cell appears to be identical, although they are not. The largest are reserved for the drone bees, smaller ones for workers and the queen bee gets her own shape and size.

The comb, the wax the bees produce to seal the honey in the combs, and the honey are unique to the honeybee. Other bees die off in the winter and emerge as the weather warms. Honeybees stay active in their hive all winter and the honey is their food source.

They produce more honey than they need for the winter, although beekeepers vary in how much honey they’ll harvest. Some, like Deacon, leave enough honey for the hive to get through the winter. Others take all the honey and feed the bees sugar water as a substitute.

“Some people do take off honey and then feed them sugar water, to make it through the winter. They will survive but they won’t be as healthy is my understanding,” she said.

This is Deacon’s 10^th year raising her own bees, although the idea had been in the back of her mind since childhood and the onetime attempt by her father.

“In my teens, my father started beekeeping,” she recalled. After a weekend away, “We came back and the house had been broken into and they had kicked over the beehive. He didn’t continue from that point forward. (But) that was just something in the back of my mind that might be a cool thing to do.”

She is a member of the Outer Banks Beekeeper’s Guild, one of the founding members, although she downplays that role.

“In my mind. I may have made phone calls to people to say, ‘Hey, let’s get together and talk about getting a group together,’” she said.

The guild is part of the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association, an amateur beekeeping organization that may be the largest in the country.

“We do have the largest state (bee) association, with nearly 5,000 paid members,” said Dr. David Tarpy, apiculture professor and extension specialist at North Carolina State University. “Compared to even large states like California and Texas (we have) more beekeepers. In Texas and California, those are large-scale commercial guys so they have more colonies but fewer beekeepers.”

There are some large commercial beekeeping operations in the state, but Tarpy, when comparing North Carolinas commercial beekeepers to other states, said they are, “vanishingly small.”

The number could be fewer than a dozen.

Not all the commercial operations take place in the state; they are, in fact, somewhat migratory.

“There are large-scale beekeepers that reside here full time and go out to California every winter for the almonds and up to Maine for the blueberries and things like that,” he said.

There are 4,000 or so species of bees that live in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and the honeybee is not even native to the continent. The first shipment of honeybees arrived in the Virginia Colony in early 1622. By the end of the 17th century, they were part of everyday life, although beeswax was the more valuable commodity at that time.

As an introduced species, there is controversy surrounding honeybees. Deacon pointed out that even her lone hive could have an effect on the local ecology.

“The problem with honeybees, you’re bringing 40,000 insects into this realm of 3 to 5 miles and all these other native bees that are all out there competing for the same plants,” she said.

Tarpy sees the issue of competition with native species as overblown and, perhaps, one that misses more significant questions.

“Whatever competition has happened, it’s been going on for 400-plus years. Ecology responds a lot faster than that,” he said. “There probably has been competition and certainly when beekeepers move their hives into a very fragile area like a desert, they can swamp whatever species are there. So it certainly is an issue and one we need to be cautious about. But is it driving the extinctions of these other bees? I think there are bigger fish to fry for that: pesticides, those kind of things.”

The pollinator population in general is under stress. And, although careless pesticide use does threaten honeybees, the most significant natural peril is the varroa mite.

It is not the mite itself, though, that is the threat, rather it is the disease the mites carry.

“I would say that public enemy No. 1, 2, and 3 are all called the varroa mite,” Tarpy said. “They’re like little vampires, sucking the bees until they’re so anemic that other stressors start to compound. But the biggest thing that we’re actively researching is that it’s not really the varroa mites that kill bees. It’s the viral pathogens that they’re vectoring. They’re like little dirty hypodermic syringe needles.”

There is no easy way to protect bees from varroa mites. The N.C. State Apiculture Program is concentrating on two areas of research: strengthening hives so they can better withstand stress and early detection of infection.

“We offer this service that if you send in your bees, we can … look at all of these different pathogens and see if we can identify if you have an overwhelming pathogen load within the colony,” Tarpy said.

Tarpy’s research is finding ways to identify the strongest queen for a colony. The apiculture lab has developed empirical measurements that can be applied to queen bee health, and Tarpy’s research has shown healthy queens correlate to a healthier hive.

“If you have a bad queen, your ceiling is low. If you have a good queen, your ceiling is high. The queen is this singular thing that beekeepers have control over,” he said.

The work is currently conducted in a dilapidated building on the N.C. State campus.

“Research is being conducted in one of the worst facilities in the University of North Carolina system,” according to the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association’s website. “There is inadequate room for instruction, storage and research … The teaching classroom is in the former kitchen and dining area where long leak stains adorn the sheetrock ceiling. During rain showers, buckets are strategically placed in order to catch rain water that drips through the sheetrock.”

The association lobbied state legislators for funds to replace the building and the North Carolina General Assembly responded in 2019 with $4 million for a new apiculture center.

“We’re on the downhill slope of the design phase, which is the fun part for me because we get to decide what kind of rooms we want, what we’re going to put in it and how we’re going to use it. We’re building this facility exactly the way that it would really work well for apiculture, science and extension. It’s having all the elements that we could ever want,” Tarpy said.

Construction is estimated to be completed in August 2024.

A farm-to-table program created to provide fresh, locally grown vegetables, fruits and produce to out-of-work food service employees during the pandemic shutdown will be expanding in North Carolina.

FarmsSHARE, a statewide food assistance program, has received a more than $7 million federal grant to boost efforts linking small farmers and businesses with underserved communities, including those in several coastal counties.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a little more than $7.6 million grant to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which then passed on $7.58 million to the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, or CFSA.

CFSA runs FarmsSHARE, a program created in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

But, as Kana Miller, CFSA’s local food distribution coordinator, explained, the program that was meant to be temporary steadily grew into what is now a network of food hubs, farmers and community-based organizations “working together to increase access to fresh, healthy, locally-grown food in underserved communities across our state while investing in small North Carolina businesses to cultivate a stable, thriving local food system.”

In just a little more than a year and a half, FarmsSHARE raised $3.6 million in state and other funding, a majority of which was invested directly in local farmers and food hubs, Miller said in an email.

CFSA allocates funds to a network of food hubs, which use the money to buy food from local farmers and small businesses. The food the hubs buy then gets distributed by the hubs themselves or community-based organizations that partner with those hubs.

“Most of our food hubs partner with local food pantries, faith-based organizations, school groups, community centers, senior housing authorities, etc., to distribute the food directly to individuals in need, free of charge,” Miller said.

With the funds raised between May 2020 and December 2022, FarmsSHARE bought more than 460 tons of locally grown produce, meat, dairy, grain, honey, jam and eggs through 15 hubs and cooperatives sourcing from 250 small and midscale farmers in more than 55 counties, she said.

During that time, more than 85,000 boxes of food were distributed to more than 1,500 households each week.

Miller said the grant will allow FarmsSHARE to work with more food hub partners and community-based organizations to procure and distribute 133,000 boxes of local food from 450 local farmers.

“We’ll also be able to assist the participating food hubs and farms in entering new markets for local food and provide technical assistance to small farms on food safety,” she said. “With this funding, we have formed new partnerships in more counties in Western North Carolina, and we plan to fill in additional gaps in our state’s Piedmont Triad and Northeastern regions.”

Feast Down East, a Pender County-based FarmsSHARE food hub partner, will continue its reach into rural communities, said the program’s Executive Director Jordyn Appel-Hughes.

“A lot of our expansion efforts into rural communities came out of FarmsSHARE,” she said.

Feast Down East was formed as a grassroots initiative initially called the Southeastern North Carolina Food Systems Program in 2006 in response to job loss and poverty in the region.

Farmers impacted by the mid-2000s tobacco buyouts were brought to the table to talk about alternative crops to harvest.

As the program evolved, eventually becoming a food hub, it provided a path to get regionally based crops from small and midsize farms directly to everyone from restaurant chefs and residents who are seeking fresh, local food to people living in food deserts.

Feast Down East distributes food to people in need through dozens of partners in Pender, Brunswick, New Hanover, Carteret, Bladen, Columbus, Duplin, Onslow, Hoke, Robeson and Sampson counties.

Appel-Hughes, who took the helm at Feast Down East in 2015, explained that the program really began to expand in counties outside of New Hanover County as a result of Hurricane Florence. The September 2018 storm’s historic rainfall resulted in flooding that made it difficult to get into some rural communities.

It wasn’t until Appel-Hughes began to assist both farmers and people in those rural communities that she understood just how much of need there is in those areas.

So, as food service workers began returning to work as pandemic restrictions slowly lifted and FarmsSHARE pivoted to reach communities that struggle to access food, Appel-Hughes wanted to make sure Feast Down East focused on rural communities.

“FarmsSHARE has been really powerful for us,” she said. “It increased our farmers’ sales by about 33 percent last year.”

Morgan Milne, owner of Red Beard Farms in Willard, was just 24 and passionate about getting fresh, locally grown food to anyone who wanted it when he started his farm.

“It’s a passion of mine,” he said. “It’s important. You quickly learn no, you do actually have to make money and so you have to find some balance there. Working with Feast Down East has absolutely increased our footprint. It’s helped maintain a source of income. I was never one to rely on one particular source of sales.”

Milne grows more than 60 different types of vegetables, including more than 100 different varieties of cauliflower along with carrots, strawberries, kale, collards, cabbage and basil varieties, arugula, Okra, sweet potatoes and shitake mushrooms.

His farm distributes more than 70 food boxes a week to households in need.

The U.S. House last week failed to override President Joe Biden’s recent veto of a resolution that would have rolled back federal clean water regulations, but the future for those rules remains cloudy as the Supreme Court weighs a case that could restrict the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate ephemeral waters and streams.

House Republicans had sought to reverse the administration’s new waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule that included regulations that the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers’ reinstated in January. The protections apply to millions of acres of North Carolina wetlands and were repealed by the Trump administration.

The GOP last week fell short of the two-thirds majority required to override Biden’s veto of the resolution sponsored by Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., and Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo.

Related: NC farm bill would restrict how state defines wetlands

The 227-196 vote included all seven North Carolina House Republicans and 1^st District Democratic Rep. Don Davis voting in favor of the veto override and Democratic Reps. Alma Adams, Kathy Manning, Wiley Nickel, Valerie Foushee and Jeff Jackson opposed. Second District Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat, did not vote.

“The Biden Administration’s waters of the United States rule is one of the most damaging in history, with the potential to devastate production agriculture, derail infrastructure projects and harm our economy,” Rouzer, who represents North Carolina’s 7^th District, said Tuesday in a press release. “Congress spoke with a loud bipartisan voice and voted against this overreach, but without enough votes from the other side of the aisle to override the President’s veto. We will continue to work to push back against and defang this onerous rule at every available opportunity.”

Rouzer had previously said that rule expands the federal government’s regulatory control, “cloaked under the guise of clean water.”

Clean water advocates, including the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, were opposed to the WOTUS rule repeal, saying in 2019 that the rollbacks would “cause significant damage to coastal natural resources and economy” and reverse efforts to protect and enhance thousands of acres of wetlands, hundreds of miles of coastal marshes and thousands of acres of estuarine waters.

Environmental justice groups, such as GreenLatinos, say there has been an ongoing campaign to create confusion around the purpose of the Clean Water Act and who is “burdened by regulations.” The group had urged the April 6 veto that was only Biden’s second.

“With this vote, all present Republicans and some Democrats have aligned with corporate interests and ignored the reality that if we truly value water as a human right, then our waters need to be better protected so that our communities have access to clean, healthy, reliable and affordable water,” GreenLatinos Director of Strategic Initiatives Mariana Del Valle Prieto Cervantes said in a March 29 statement released after the Senate’s 53-43 vote for a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, in which a simple majority is sufficient to pass.

The House had also voted 227-198 to reject the rule under the Congressional Review Act.

The Obama administration finalized the controversial WOTUS rule in 2015, expanding its definition and prompting legal challenges backed by agriculture, construction and coal industries.

The Trump administration replaced the WOTUS rule with the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which Biden vowed to repeal via executive order upon taking office.

The Biden administration’s revised WOTUS rule was itself dubbed a compromise that included acknowledgement of recent court decisions and a reversion to some Reagan-era policies.

“The 2023 revised definition of ‘Waters of the United States’ carefully sets the bounds for which bodies of water are protected under the Clean Water Act. It provides clear rules of the road that will help advance infrastructure projects, economic investments, and agricultural activities — all while protecting water quality and public health,” according to Biden’s veto message to the House.

Biden said the loss of a clear WOTUS definition would threaten economic growth, including for agriculture, local economies and downstream communities. He said the veto override would have also negatively affected tens of millions of U.S. households that depend on healthy wetlands and streams.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in North Dakota halted implementation of the Biden administration’s WOTUS rule in 24 Republican-led states, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, pending the outcome of a lawsuit. Another recent injunction had blocked implementation in Idaho and Texas.

Elsewhere, the rule took effect March 20.

The Supreme Court is currently considering the case of Sackett v. EPA, to determine whether a federal appeals court set forth the proper test for determining whether wetlands are “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. The case involves an Idaho couple whose home construction violated the Clean Water Act because their lot contains wetlands that qualify as regulated “navigable waters.”

North Carolina’s environmental regulatory agency should require large-scale hog farms to use cleaner technologies when storing the animals’ waste so it can be converted to energy, according to environmental groups legally challenging the state’s new general biogas permits.

The Environmental Justice Community Action Network and Cape Fear River Watch are taking to task the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, challenging the agency’s digester waste management system general permits, which allow concentrated feeding animal operations, or CAFOs, to use what the groups call “outdated” lagoon-and-sprayfield systems.

The groups argue that storing untreated hog feces and urine in capped pits then spraying the waste onto fields produce more harmful emissions, polluting air, waterways and groundwater, a drinking water source for rural communities in which these operations occur.

DEQ’s general biogas permit, which went into effect July 1, lacks protections to account for that additional anticipated pollution, strips residents of the rural, largely Black, Hispanic and low-income communities where the hog farms are located from being able to engage in public input, and fails to comply with state law requiring cleaner technology, opponents argue.

“We think it’s DEQ’s obligation under the law to require whatever cleaner technology is best for a particular hog operation because the scale and size of these hog operations that may apply for the biogas general permit vary significantly,” said Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC.

As of Sept. 27, 2021, 15 out of more than 2,083 permitted swine facilities in the state have one or more animal waste digester systems, according to information on DEQ’s website. A little more than half of those are in Duplin County, where pork giant Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy have plans to build a biogas facility.

Digesters are used to convert manure into biogas, which produces naturally when microorganisms break down organic matter in an oxygen-free, or anaerobic process.

According to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, biogas created through the anaerobic process consists of about 60% methane gas.

Methane-based biogas can be converted to renewable natural gas through a process that increases the methane concentration from about 60% to 96% while reducing the gasses’ moisture and carbon dioxide content, according to the center’s website.

Environmental and community groups say the lagoon-and-sprayfield system offers the least environmental protection because the ammonia and other gases trapped in covered lagoons will produce higher amounts of nitrogen, which gets sprayed onto farm fields when the lagoon-and-sprayfield system is used.

Covered lagoons can contain up to 3.5 times the amount of nitrogen as uncovered lagoons, according to the Colorado State University Extension.

“Because this permit could apply to numerous hog operations it raises a lot of concern among community members and the conservation community around additional pollution that will result from this permit,” Hildebrand said.

She made clear that the groups are not recommending one specific technology.

“There is certainly room for an anaerobic digester in an overall waste management system that addresses both the climate crisis as well as the underlying pollution and sickness that is caused by storing billions of gallons of hog waste in giant pits in the ground and then spraying it on fields,” Hildebrand said.

Take, for example, Premium Standard Farms Inc., a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, which operates a CAFO in northwest Missouri that uses an advanced nitrification and denitrification system.

This system is designed to reduce odor, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide air emissions from wastewater treatment sources and the amount of nitrogen sprayed onto the land by at least 50%.

Sherri White-Williamson, cofounder of the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, pushed back against suggestions the group wants to put an industry out of business. Rather, she said, they want the industry to be more responsible for the environment in which the residents they represent live.

“A general permit is a one-size fits all system, regardless of the number of animals you have,” she said. “That doesn’t seem to make good environmental sense. At the very minimum we would like to see the denitrification system that has shown to be better for taking care of the toxins that come out of this process. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

DEQ also should step up its monitoring requirements from once a year to at least quarterly, she said.

DEQ’s own Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board in written comments to the agency called for monitoring.

The four individual biogas permits the state issued to hog farm operators last year, “do not require any regular air or water monitoring to assess the nature or volume of any emissions or discharges or the impact thereof on public health or the local environment,” according to the board.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette did not return a call seeking comment, but he stated in a news release that the North Carolina General Assembly’s passage of the Farm Act of 2021 and DEQ’s general permit, “are just the latest in a long line of decisions that ignore the devastating effect that the hog industry has on our environment. Far from a solution to our climate crisis, this permit gives industry a rubber stamp to keep polluting our air and water rather than holding them accountable to the law.”

Related: New laws: Biogas, clean water funds in budget; rule tweaks

Smithfield Foods has partnered with Dominion Energy to invest more than $500 million in biogas development in North Carolina, Virginia and Utah.

The companies have formed Align Renewable Natural Gas LLC, which is proposing to link 19 farms in Duplin and Sampson counties through a pipeline to a facility in Duplin County.

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the legal challenge on behalf of the groups July 29 in the North Carolina Office of Administrative Hearings.

This is the latest challenge against the state’s biogas permits, which apply to swine, cattle and wet poultry operations. The general permit for swine may be obtained by existing operations of 250 or more hogs.

In January, the SELC filed a complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the Duplin County branch of the NAACP and North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, launching an investigation into whether the state’s issuance of four biogas permits violated civil rights.

Hildebrand said the EPA has not made an announcement, but she hopes to hear something soon.

“It’s easy to talk about these abstract contexts of biogas making pollution worse, but I think what’s also really important to remember in all of this is that people live near these hog operations,” Hildebrand said. “They have dealt with this noxious odor and polluted water and dirty air for decades. There’s a real human cost to this permit and to industry’s insistence on doubling down on the very harmful lagoon-and-sprayfield system. This is a significant environmental justice issue in eastern North Carolina and one that demands and deserves the attention of our elected officials and the agency that is charged with protecting the environment and the health of people who live in the state.”

“Local” qualifies as one of the most overused words of the early 2000s. So commonplace then on restaurant menus, in food markets and in food media, “local” became a dubious descriptor even co-opted by nonfood companies (local landscaping anyone?). All the hyperbole culminated in “Farm to Fable,” an investigative series that earned journalist Laura Reiley a Pulitzer Prize nomination for exposing misleading claims around local food. 

That’s too bad because eating local still matters at a deeper level than the cliché “local” leads us to believe.

“Eating is never as simple as we might imagine,” writes author and editor Marcie Cohen Ferris as she introduces 20 leading activists, chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs, scholars and others in the food realm who penned essays for her new book “Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor.”

The writers Ferris unites demonstrate the complexity, reach and significant impacts of local food in North Carolina. They extend stereotypical farm-to-table’s narrow boundaries out to what Ferris calls “the story of the contemporary food landscape.”

“Edible North Carolina” presents a panorama that encompasses the state’s food history, heritage and Indigenous and regional tastes like the Lumbee Tribe’s collard sandwiches in Robeson County and Down East commercial fishers’ favorite wild-caught scallop fritters. New voices broaden local flavors and concentrate food activism on today’s issues of access, equality, sustainability, reconnection, diversity and inclusivity.

“When I arrived in Cary and became the first Latina food columnist for the local newspaper, the resistance to my voice was swift,” Sandra A. Gutierrez writes in her “Edible North Carolina” essay. She recalls a subscriber in the mid-1980s upset that “her beloved paper had chosen a ‘Mexican’ as the writer for its food section.”

“Had I capitulated to this racism, I would not have witnessed the birth of a new culinary movement in the region. I embraced the culinary traditions of my southern white and Black readers but at the same time found my passion to introduce them to a global world of flavor.”

Baby steps like pulled pork tacos and chipotle in barbecue sauce that Gutierrez and others helped guide over the years led to a 2022 James Beard best chef southeast award nomination for Indian-born Cheetie Kumar of Raleigh’s acclaimed Garland. The restaurant’s Indian and Asian flavors and techniques are “driven by in-season ingredients from our home in Raleigh,” Kumar writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

Population migration has shaped North Carolina’s food landscape since the beginning. Ferris, a southern-foodways-focused professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, traces the state’s “edible history” from Indigenous people to African, English, Scottish, Irish, European and more influences. The mix is responsible for the state’s distinctive and nationally celebrated flavor — North Carolina took three James Beard Awards in 2022. That food scene nurtures understanding and acceptance of immigrant populations.

That’s good news, but behind the scenes, local food culture is ailing.

Lack of food access, poor pay for food industry workers, big agriculture consuming small farms and the fragility of centralized food supply chains are just some symptoms. The COVID pandemic, climate change, political divisions and the immigration crisis have magnified problems that are affecting the “economic livelihoods of thousands of North Carolinians in ways unimaginable in the past,” Ferris writes.

“Now more than ever we viscerally understand what it means to lose local farms, entrepreneurs, food markets, food banks, school cafeterias, beloved neighborhood restaurants and landmark food venues.”

“Edible North Carolina” contributors take readers through a range of unsettling emotions as they describe what is being lost but then lift them up with exciting changes driven by the many challenges.

Carla Norwood and Gabe Cummings offer a heartbreaking account of how Warren County’s once-thriving farm economy has declined over the past 50 years, including the farm that has been in Norwood’s family for generations. Residents who long had access to fresh, healthy, local food face decreasing numbers of supermarkets. Just two remain in the entire 444-square-mile county. Tiny downtown Warrenton alone hosted four bustling food markets 100 years ago.

As agriculture has waned, so have job opportunities. The poverty rate is high; a quarter of the population is food insecure.

“All the cues from the modern world seem to say: leave this place behind; go to a city with high-paying jobs where you can shop at upscale supermarkets and eat in trendsetting restaurants,” Norwood and Cummings write.

“Dislocation” of local food economies, as Norwood and Cummings term it, has impacted commercial fishers as much as farmers. In 2000, Carteret County watermen faced intense competition from cheaper, inferior and unsafe imported seafood, cultural preservationist Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, writes in her piece about North Carolina’s local seafood movement. Fish houses faded as pricey waterfront development overtook communities and blocked entry to public waters.

Instead of giving up, Norwood, Cummings and Carteret County families did exactly what Ferris said she hopes “Edible North Carolina” inspires readers to do: support and help rebuild local food systems that will assure food sovereignty for everyone.

“I really hope that people think about two things maybe: joy and justice,” Ferris says.

“I want people to understand their power as eaters in the state of North Carolina, as people who buy and consume foods and impact the health of their community. I think when you read this book you can start feeling what are the small ways you can help rebuild your little landscape.”

Norwood and Cummings in 2010 founded a nonprofit that connects diverse farmers and food entrepreneurs with new markets. The organization also repurposes abandoned spaces for local food processing.

Commercial fishing families organized Carteret Catch to brand local seafood, show consumers why it was better, and prove to restaurant professionals that diners were willing to pay more for it. Seafood sales increased, and more Catch groups formed along the coast.

Without that local catch and traditional seafood preparations he grew up eating in New Bern’s African American community, chef Ricky Moore would not have won a 2022 best chef southeast James Beard award for his work at Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham. The restaurant’s devotion to local foodways helped put North Carolina on the national culinary map.

“The backbone of my business – North Carolina fish and seafood – is sourced from local fishermen and women,” Moore writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

“As a son of this place, it is my mission to uplift the fisherfolk who tend its waters and share its seafood bounty.”

“Edible North Carolina” grew from Ferris’ classroom teachings on southern and North Carolina food culture. As students listened to guest lecturers like Amspacher and collected oral histories, the need for those voices to be collected in a serious tome emerged. Still, every “Edible North Carolina” essay ends on a light note, a recipe that reflects the writer or subject’s food journey.

Norwood and Cummings share a Warren County resident’s classic sweet potato pie. Anthropologist Courtney Lewis, concerned with the loss of Indigenous foodways, offers tuya gadu, a Cherokee bean bread. First-generation Southerner chef Oscar Diaz contributes BrunsMex Stew with black beans, cilantro and fresh tomato salsa.

Recipes were important to include, Ferris says, because they “speak to a moment. They speak to history …To many generations of family.” A recipe “communicates to us in another language,” she says.

That language is one that everyone understands because everyone must eat. Cooking leads to meals, and meals can stir conversation about what local food really means and the many lives it touches. Over dinner, we might consider numerous ways to help — shopping at the neighborhood seafood market, volunteering to pull weeds at an urban farm, checking supermarket produce sections for local vegetables, lobbying lawmakers, starting a movement.

“Edible North Carolina” makes us realize that we must never let “local food” be relegated to one more meaningless marketing campaign.

A two-day virtual meeting for those in the agriculture industry to share their knowledge, experience and ideas for soil health is set for Aug. 11-12.

“Scaling up Soil Health” is the seventh annual meeting for the Morrisville-based Soil Health Institute, a nonprofit charged with safeguarding and enhancing the vitality and productivity of soils.

There will be practical information, research, and actionable takeaways offered that is relevant to farmers, agribusiness, consultants, scientists, field conservationists, government and nongovernmental professionals.

Sessions will be from 10 a.m. to noon, and 1-3 p.m. both days.

Related: Climate change sharpens focus on NC farms’ soil quality

While the meeting is free to attend, registering online is required.

“’Scaling Up Soil Health,’ reflects both the urgency and opportunity for scaling adoption of regenerative soil health systems to mitigate climate change, improve water quality, sustain farms and rural communities, and bring widespread environmental benefits for all of us,” said Dr. Wayne Honeycutt, president and CEO of the Soil Health Institute.

Sessions will address the following topics:

• Farmers’ experiences with regenerative soil health systems.
• Engaging commodities for scaling regenerative soil health systems.
• Climate change mitigation through soil health: integrating local to global initiatives.
• Institute’s recommended measurements for scaling soil health assessments: scientific basis and practical application.
• Creating impactful learning opportunities in soil health education programs.

The Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to investigate “the discriminatory impact of pollution and adverse health risks, including premature death, that industrial hog operations impose on Black and Latino communities in North Carolina,” the Southern Environmental Law Center announced Friday.

The civil rights complaint alleges the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality discriminated against Black, Latino and Native American residents of Duplin and Sampson counties on March 31, 2021, when the state agency issued three individual swine animal waste management system permits and one certificate of coverage, which authorizes the construction and operation of anaerobic digestion animal waste treatment systems to produce renewable energy, according to EPA Director of External Civil Rights Compliance Office and Office of General Counsel Lilian Dorka’s Jan. 13 response to the law center’s complaint.

The law center filed the complaint on behalf of the Duplin County Branch of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign.

“We are excited that the EPA decided to investigate this complaint. As a ‘watch dog’ for those most negatively impacted by the hog industry, we consider the investigation of this complaint as a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, we also understand that there is much more work to be done,” Duplin County NAACP Chapter President Robert Moore said in a statement.

The complaint alleged that the permits issued by NCDEQ allowing “four Smithfield-owned hog operations to use cesspits full of hog waste and sprayfields to produce energy, failed to protect the surrounding communities from air and water pollution. A disproportionate share of the hundreds of families who live around these hog operations are Black and Latino.”

The EPA committed to investigating whether NCDEQ discriminated on the basis of race and national origin against the residents of Duplin and Sampson counties by issuing the permits and whether the department complied with general nondiscrimination obligations.

“EPA’s decision to investigate the disproportionate impacts of these permits on North Carolina’s poor and communities of color is crucial in maintaining robust commitments to environmental justice in our state. Real solutions to our climate crisis must serve all communities, including the most vulnerable. We look forward to EPA’s findings,” said William Barber, III with the NC Poor People’s Campaign.

NCDEQ is currently developing a general permit for industrial hog operations to install lagoon covers and produce biogas, which the law center said would allow harmful projects with minimal scrutiny by the public.

“We are pleased that EPA will investigate how DEQ’s failure to require common-sense measures to limit pollution is impacting families in Duplin and Sampson counties,” said Blakely Hildebrand of the Southern Environmental Law Center, in a statement. “We hope that DEQ can quickly correct its course and protect communities near industrial hog operations as it develops a new general permit for hog operations that produce biogas.”

Sharon Martin, NCDEQ’s Public Affairs deputy secretary, told Coastal Review Friday that the state agency is reviewing the EPA letter.

“DEQ is committed to the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all North Carolinians and we have given significant priority to compliance with Title VI requirements, particularly with regard to animal waste permitting,” she said.

Roy Lee Lindsey, CEO of the North Carolina Pork Council, which represents the state’s pork industry, told Coastal Review that the farms in question were working toward environmental improvements and that the action indicates no discrimination.

“A previous civil rights complaint against DEQ was settled with no finding of discrimination with regard to the permitting of North Carolina hog farms. It is surprising that these four farms are now under attack for trying to make environmental improvements on their farms. We are confident that when the facts of this complaint are reviewed, the result will be the same and there will be no finding of discrimination,” Lindsey said in a statement. “By the EPA’s own declaration, all that is necessary for a complaint to be investigated is to file it in writing, to file it with a certain number of days, to allege there was discrimination, and to file it against an entity that received federal dollars. The letter itself acknowledges that it is not a finding of discrimination — merely that the complainant checked enough boxes to open an investigation.”

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

PLYMOUTH — As warnings about the need to immediately and drastically cut carbon emissions were blaring full volume at November’s 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP26, climate summit in Scotland, talk of carbon markets suddenly filled airwaves and the Internet sites. And agriculture was named as the logical vehicle to sell carbon credits.

Carbon trading has been around since 2005 as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate carbon’s effect on global warming, but it’s grown in fits and starts. As authorized by governments, an entity would be allowed to emit an agreed-upon amount of carbon dioxide in exchange for credits that had been purchased — say, from a farmer — to offset the carbon pollution.  Rules for global carbon trading were formalized at COP26. 

Ronnie W. “Ron” Heiniger, associate professor at North Carolina State University and professor and cooperative extension corn specialist at the Vernon G. James Research and Extension Center in Plymouth who has worked with farmers in the region for 28 years, recently elaborated on the labyrinth facing farmers in figuring the value of carbon credits, while they’re contending with numerous other climate challenges.

Corn and other crops absorb tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, he told Coastal Review. Satellite images of eastern North Carolina in the summertime show that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere above its farm fields go down quite dramatically as the crops absorb the greenhouse gas.

“And you would think that was a great deal,” Heiniger said. “The problem, of course, is that we lose some of that CO2 that was absorbed into the plant. As the plants decay, they release some of that back into the atmosphere.”

Also, with tilling, the microbes in the soil survive by eating organic molecules, and they release carbon dioxide, he said. “They have to respire, just like human beings.”

Plus, a lot of the soils in the region are peat, which can be 50% carbon.

“Anytime you disturb those, some of the carbon is released,” Heiniger said. “So the issue here is how do we get this carbon that we captured in this crop to stay in the soil.”

With more talk of sequestering carbon, and no-till methods and cover crops, which can encourage a longer growing season, and fewer fallow or bare fields, the concept of selling carbon credits to offset things like oil and gas projects is a possibility. But, he said, it’s not only farmers who are skeptical, so are researchers at N.C. State.

“We’re concerned about this concept of carbon credits because we want to make sure what you’re getting paid for is actually happening,” he said. “The issue is the science needs to be better developed for how much carbon is sequestered and what practices are best for doing it. Those issues still remain to be answered from this mitigation side.”

Cover crops, which involve seeding fields with some kind of grass as a crop is being harvested, with the goal of growing biomass to cover the land. But the practice also creates conundrums. Although it can keep down the need for herbicides by suppressing weeds, as well as protect soil, the cover has to be removed when planting season returns. And the way it’s removed is through chemicals — or plowing it into the soil.

Heiniger said that records over the years reflect a steady increase since the mid-1990s in the number of days at or above 95 degrees, and changes in insect populations and the types of insects that affect crops. There is also increased saltwater intrusion in some low areas. Some of the saltwater is coming up from the groundwater, which presents an even more difficult situation than that coming in from the canals that can be blocked or flushed.

But the rain has become a huge headache.

“The intensity of these storms — that definitely has caught our attention, Heiniger said. “We get more of these 6-. 8-, 10-,12-inch rainfalls than we did close to 30 years ago, when I started here.”

Floodwaters are staying in fields for longer times, suffocating crops.

“And as I tell farmers, when your soil is saturated, that means there’s no oxygen in there,” he explained. “It’s like being in a drought because basically the crop can’t take up water, even though it’s sitting in water. So, it can’t cool itself. It’s basically like you’re in a desert then.”

Heiniger said that the drainage systems — pumps and canals — are critical infrastructure to farmers, although public funds are not provided to maintain them.

Changes in the climate converging with growing resistance to pesticides have led to an increasing problem with stinkbugs, which are better suited to warmer temperatures, he said. And there has been increased damage from bugs in corn, soybeans and cotton.

Heiniger said that corn is the largest crop in northeastern North Carolina by acreage, followed closely by soybeans and cotton a distant third.

Much of the corn grown in the region is used to feed livestock, which provides a more favorable economic return, he explained. The type of corn has also been bred to be more stress-tolerant.

The skyrocketing cost of fertilizer is leading farmers to switch to growing more soybeans, which require less nitrogen, Heiniger said. They also take steps to conserve fertilizer, using less of it, changing the timing and increasing the root system.

As a result of rising costs, he said, farmers will plant less corn, so there will be less corn in the market, and prices will be higher.

Since the 1960s or so, farms in northeastern North Carolina were generally larger than the rest of the state, and they’ve gotten bigger over time. Equipment costs have also gotten bigger — a combine can run about a half-million dollars.

“It’s like owning a beach house,” Heiniger said, chuckling. “You’ve got to get bigger to make that pay.”

Most of the small farms on the sand ridges that had been farmed since the 1600s have been consolidated now into bigger farms, or they’re leased or managed by big farms. But whatever the size of the farm, mitigation methods, including no-till and cover crops, are very early in the development stage.

“Not that we haven’t done cover crops, or that we haven’t done no-till, it’s just that we haven’t put together a system that tries to use all of these to do this,” he said.

Although cover crops can save money otherwise spent on herbicides, the technique is regarded as uneconomical because a farmer is planting something that can’t be harvested. But carbon credits would have the potential to compensate farmers to plant cover crops.

Heiniger said it would probably take up to five years for scientists to develop a strategy that promoted the maximum amount of carbon being returned. Typically, it takes at least three years of ground studies to confirm a practice as viable, and then another couple of years to introduce it to farmers or growers.

N.C. State has started programs looking at cover crops and reduced tillage systems, but more information on carbon sequestering requires soil sampling, testing and data analysis — and the money to do the work.

“We need more funding if we’re going to make progress,” he said. “As you see, agriculture is the linchpin here. They could talk all they wanted on TV about how they’re going to be climate neutral. They’re depending on these credits, and agriculture is it.”

Is agriculture able to participate yet in carbon markets?

“The answer is no,” Heiniger said. “Right now, we’re not ready.”

Once the wrinkles are smoothed out, he fully expects that farmers will be willing participants, including those who are climate change skeptics. It’s the “doomsday scenarios” mixed in with the science that puts them off, he explained. That and unrealistic talk about such fantastical things as electric tractors, which could not — at least with current technology — provide the concentrated power that’s necessary to run such heavy equipment.

“Farmers know climate is changing,” he said. “Farmers understand we adapt, you figure out how to get it done, you mitigate, you find systems that cool the crop or reduce that runoff area and get that water off quicker. You find ways to solve those problems.

“I think that’s what hurts the climate change thing, is that we end up talking about things that are speculative rather than concrete,” Heiniger said. “Farmers see the environment — they don’t talk about it. They farm it.”

Next: Harnessing the ocean’s energy

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

Agriculture is a major industry in North Carolina, as well as an important source of food for the U.S.

In 2020, according to Carolina Demography, soybeans were North Carolina’s most valuable crop, at $674 million. Corn was the second-most valuable, at $483 million. Ranked third were the state’s famed sweet potatoes, valued at about $375 million, a 15.7% increase from 2019 ($324 million).

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report on climate change and land released in 2019 reveals complex and often little understood dynamics between land, plants and water in a rapidly warming planet.

Related: Climate solutions may rely on farms, but technology lags

Findings include the following:

• About 25% of the mitigation of their carbon contributions pledged by nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement are land-based options, including soil carbon sequestration, agricultural management and bioenergy, as well as reduced deforestation and forest sinks   
• Between 21% to 37% of total greenhouse gas emissions are related to the food system, from agriculture to transport to processing to consumption. Of that, 9-14% of emissions are from crop and livestock activities, and 5-14% come from land use and land use change such as peatland degradation and deforestation. An additional 5-10% are from supply chain activities, including food loss and food waste.

Suggested mitigation tactics include the following:

• Reduction in crop and livestock emissions and modifications in food choices.
• Sequestering carbon in soils and biomass and reducing fertilizer emissions.
• Combined supply-side and demand-side actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance food system resilience.
• Conditions to enable adaptation and risk-sharing created and supported through public policies and incentives.

“Such combined measures can enable the implementation of large-scale land-based adaptation and mitigation strategies without threatening food security from increased competition for land for food production and higher food prices,” the report said. “Without combined food system measures in farm management, supply chains, and demand, adverse effects would include increased numbers of malnourished people and impacts on smallholder farmers.”

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The North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, released in June 2020, examines the climate change picture for the state.  

Findings include the following:

• The water cycle is intensifying, resulting in more severe flooding and drought.
• Rainfall patterns are changing, with heavy rain falling in once-dry places and likely increased precipitation in high latitudes.
• Continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century in coastal areas will contribute to increased shoreline erosion and more severe and frequent flooding in low-lying areas.
• Extreme flood events that used to happen once a century could occur every year by 2100.
• Intense rain deluges combined with inadequate storm drainage infrastructure increase vulnerability of inland communities to flooding, putting them at more risk of suffering economic and agricultural losses.
• Natural areas and productive land within the state’s interior counties could be impacted by more frequent flooding, resulting in losses of habitats, fisheries and protective buffers in local communities.
• Groundwater and surface waters will become more vulnerable to contamination from saltwater intrusion caused by rising seas, changing salinity levels in estuarine communities.
• Increased saltwater intrusion due to sea level rise is expected to convert lower coastal floodplains from swamp forest to wetlands.
• Freshwater that is affected by saltwater intrusion could cause crop yields to decline and make farmland unsuitable for growing crops, in addition to leaving less available freshwater for agriculture.
• Expected elevated night-time temperatures will have outsized negative impacts on agriculture and forestry due to disruptions in plant physiology.

The report’s climate change recommendations for land include the following:

• Farm and forest assets must be protected by adaptive capacities, technologies, equipment, crops and strategies. Experienced and trained personnel will be necessary to address the increasing climate change hazards.
• More research and development is needed to create adaptive varieties and species for crops and animals to increase heat resistance.
• Regenerative practices need to be developed to sequester carbon in farmlands, pocosin and forests. Also, improvements in manure management on farms is required to prevent greenhouse gas emissions.
• Protection of the state’s endemic species with adaptive management is a necessary responsibility.
• Pocosin and peatlands must be restored and/or enhanced in order to prevent soil loss and wildfire risk.

This is part of a series of special reports by Catherine Kozak, who attended the COP26 climate conference held in November.

GLASGOW, Scotland — At its essence, agriculture is science, and food is fuel. But it’s the farmer and the cook who transform each, respectively, into creative human endeavors that serve as scaffolding for society and culture. 

The 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP26, cited the interconnection of global agriculture with our global food system as one of the most critical climate issues facing humanity.

Global agriculture has suffered a productivity loss of 21% in the last 60 years as a result of climate change, yet global food production must increase 56% over 2010 levels to meet the needs of the world’s population in 2050.

That alarming assessment was part of what’s behind ClimateShot, a campaign to transform agricultural innovation featured in November during the global climate summit COP26.

Also described as the “global action agenda for innovation in agriculture,” the effort is intended to drive creative solutions with an alliance from food, farm and climate sectors. But the convergence of climate change issues in just northeastern North Carolina farms indicates the complexity of the challenges.

“A ClimateShot would make food systems more sustainable and climate-smart,” according to material about the program provided at the conference. “Such innovation will make sustainable agriculture more affordable, attractive and more widely adapted than unsustainable practices around the world by 2030, to the benefit of people, nature and the planet.”

It’s not that agriculture as an industry hasn’t tapped cutting-edge techniques, such as drones to GPS on tractors to satellite tracking that can monitor and test soils and rainfall and crops, but more nature-based practices are needed to mitigate the effects of agriculture on the climate, Robert Beach, a research fellow in agricultural, resource and energy economics and policy program at RTI International in Raleigh, told Coastal Review at COP26.

“Farmers tend to be a group that doesn’t tend to believe in climate change,” he said. “Sort of ironically, farmers are potentially one of the more affected groups.”

Beach, who grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, said he understands why people in a profession that has constantly adapted to weather and changing conditions would be skeptical. But as a scientist, he also appreciates the urgent need for agriculture to adopt new climate-friendly practices.

“Fertilizer is one of the biggest sources of nitrogen oxide in the world,” he said, referring to a top greenhouse gas culprit that can also cause dead zones and algal blooms in water bodies.

But some of the new farm machinery can access data that allows fertilizer to be applied more precisely to the needs of the crop.

“Potentially, they can save money and avoid over-application and reduce some of the runoff,” Beach said.

No doubt, agriculture has gotten more efficient, he said, but more climate-smart tactics will be required for productive and sustainable farms into the future. For instance, scientists could solve lots of challenges by creating seeds for plants that are salt-tolerant and adaptable to different conditions. 

“I guess that’s the silver bullet,” Beach said. “It doesn’t need fertilizer and it grows no matter what.” 

Jeff Sparks, president of the Blacklands Farm Managers Association, said that since about 2014, the northeast region has been pummeled by storms that come more frequently and dump record amounts of rain. Based in Washington, in Beaufort County, the group was established in 1970 to represent farmers in Beaufort, Hyde, Tyrrell, Washington and, later, Carteret counties. The group currently has about 500 paying members.

Sparks, who runs Green Valley Farms in Columbia, in Tyrrell County, said that the flooding in the last nine years or so has hurt the farm economy in the region. 

“It doesn’t really matter what farm prices are … if prices are cheap or high,” he told Coastal Review. “If you have nothing to sell, you know, you still have nothing.” 

But with more moderate weather during the last two years, farmers have been able to build back some of the lost capital.

Besides increased numbers and intensity of rain events, Sparks said there has also been issues of saltwater intrusion in some low-lying lands in Tyrrell and Hyde counties, But still, he’s not jumping on the climate change bandwagon.

“I think we’ve got climate cycles and if you go back and look at 2,000 to 3,000 years of history, it’ll show you that the climate runs in cycles. You know, hot wet spells, cool wet spells. So, I don’t know if we have anything majorly changing,” he said. “The way I view a lot of this is that man didn’t build this world and man’s not going to tear it up. So that’s just the way I look at it. The good Lord is in charge of it, whatever happens, happens.”

At the same time, Sparks is not in denial about the effects of warming temperatures — such as how thunderstorms build higher and hold more water — or the unique challenges facing his region.

“If we go back and look at all of our history and our scientific maps and everything, we’re talking whether it be climate change or climate cycles, the ocean here used to back toward the Rocky Mount way,” he said. “They’ve got evidence. Even where we are, we dig down 20 foot deep, and we’ll find seashells.

“Maybe one day this might be water. We don’t know. It’s just so many things we don’t understand. Some of these scientists we got, I get a little aggravated sometimes, I say we know more about up there where the stars and moon is than we do right here under our own feet. You know, there’s a ton to learn here, but it seems like we don’t want to.”

With elevation in the five counties ranging from 30 feet above sea level at the highest, and about 3 feet below sea level at its lowest, miles of canals and numerous drainage districts crisscross the lands. Farmers are trying to adapt to more floods and higher groundwater levels by building dikes higher and putting more pumps in to get the water out, Sparks said.

In the more isolated areas such as in Tyrrell, he said, they can pump water straight up to the Alligator River, but areas toward Washington county, drainage districts are more common, since water has to flow through the properties of multiple landowners.

Some of the older gentlemen in their 80s who have fished their entire lives in the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds and the ocean seem to think, he said, that the ocean hasn’t really risen, at least compared to the inland waters.

“They’re saying with all these big rain events we’ve had in the last 10 years that a lot of the sediment from upstream — Raleigh way, Virginia way — has filled these channels in and the water can’t get out of here. When the tide backs in, it just stays in forever.”

That means that the canals would have to be dredged to improve drainage, which Sparks said should be the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issue was raised about three years ago by the association, which had hired a water drainage management specialist. They met twice with then-state Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan, who is now the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“We thought we were really making some headway and trying to get stuff done, and well, then the world fell apart last year, and everything’s just been kind of forgotten about,” he said. “I think we’ve got some good momentum to move forward with it, once we get everything kind of behind us.”

Although the region’s black soil is rich and productive, the floods have taken a toll.

“There used to be a lot of vegetable crops in this area — sweet corn, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce — and it really kind of faded out whenever the heavy rains started 10 years ago. And then you were just losing everything.”

They’re still growing corn and wheat and soybeans. Vegetable crops have been mainly moved up to the sandier regions around Chowan County that drains better but can also be irrigated if needed.

But he said that it seems that the scientists working on crop genetics and engineering are breeding plants that can cope with drought stress and dry conditions.

“They’re not really pushing for anything that can grow in 80-inches-of-rain-a-year environments,” he said. “I mean, that’s one of our issues.”

Sparks said that he has told some of the agricultural experts he has talked with at numerous meetings that they need to develop crops that can handle saturated soils for prolonged periods.

“You know, when they go back and look at the bulk of the crop area in the U.S. or the world, it’s like less than 5% is probably this way. The other 95% is facing dry issues more so than wet issues,” he said.

But the farmers are open to trying new crops — past ideas about growing hemp or mustard seed for biofuel never materialized — and innovations, as long as they can make a living.

Some innovations, such as a 2021 study that showed that covering 4,000 miles of irrigation canals in California with solar panels would save 65 billion gallons of water annually from evaporating while generating power on land that is already being used, may someday be adaptable to North Carolina farmlands, he said.

And cover crops to reduce insects and protect soil are starting to be used more.

In a normal season with moderate rain, cover crops could cut the need for one or two herbicide applications, he said. Overall, pesticides and herbicides are not working as well, and farmers are rotating their crops more than they used to and managing nutrient applications.

Fertilizer went up 600% this year, he said. In November 2020, a ton of nitrogen cost about $170. Today, it’s about $625 a ton. And it’s predicted to go up another $200 by spring.

As is the nature of the profession, farmers are trying to figure things out as they continue working.

“I know there’s all these carbon credits. So much of that, nobody knows. Everybody explains it, (but) it’s like the Wild, Wild West.”

One challenge, he said, is measuring carbon while taking into account offsets for energy and nitrogen fertilizers used to grow the crop.

“So you know, that’s kind of a Catch-22 that we’re not sure about,” he said. “We’re in a sustainability fad, and every company and organization had to have a certificate or a plan for sustainability. The beef industry, the pork industry, the corn industry, soybeans — the whole group has spent billions, I’d say, in the last seven or eight years to come up with this because this is what the consumer wants, and (what) the world wants. So, this is what we’re trying to do. And I think this carbon credit thing is kind of following suit.”

Beach, the RTI scientist, agreed that the carbon credits being used to offset carbon dioxide produced elsewhere are complex.

“Agriculture is heterogeneous,” Beach explained. “If they’re paying for a credit, they’re going to want to know what it’s for. Even within a farm, there’s some variation in terms of how much of a difference you’ve done in the past. In some land, you may get different sequestration

There’s been a lot of work, but we still need to understand the effect on yields, emissions, sequestration, cost of production. Different parts of the world will have different conditions.”

Meanwhile, farmers in northeastern North Carolina are trying to cope with getting through 2022.

“Budgets for next year are looking really tight,” Sparks said. “Even with the price of grain that you sell it for, if you have an average to above average year, you can pencil out a little profit. “But if you have a year where you have some of these storms return like we had in 2019 and ’18 and ’16, it’s not going to be a good situation for a lot of folks.”

Next: The science of agriculture

A recent ruling to end the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, reverting back to the pre-2015 definition of “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, and a proposed rule to revise the definition of WOTUS, has raised some questions that the North Carolina Cooperative Extension hopes to answer during a virtual meeting.

The “WOTUS and Agriculture” webinar is set for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The discussion will explore the proposed changes and their expected effects on farms and farm properties. Register online for the Zoom meeting.

Andrew Branan, assistant extension professor in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University, is expected to discuss the differences in the former, current and proposed rules from a legal viewpoint. Chad Poole, assistant professor and extension specialist in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at North Carolina State University, is expected to explore the changes from an engineering perspective.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army issued on April 21, 2020, the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, “a final rule defining the scope of waters federally regulated under the Clean Water Act,” According to the Federal Register from April 2020. “The Navigable Waters Protection Rule is the second step in a comprehensive, two-step process intended to review and revise the definition” of WOTUS, consistent with then-President Trump’s executive order dated Feb. 28, 2017.

Following an executive order signed January 2021 by President Joe Biden directing federal agencies to review certain regulations, the agencies reviewed the rule and found that it “did not appropriately consider the water quality impacts of its approach to defining ‘waters of the United States’ and that the rule’s reduction in the scope of protected waters could have a potentially extensive and adverse impact on the nation’s waters,” according to the Federal Register.

The agencies announced June 2021 intentions to revise the definition of “waters of the United States.”  The forthcoming rule proposes to restore the regulations defining “waters of the United States” in place for decades until 2015, updated to be consistent with relevant Supreme Court decisions.

After a federal district court decision vacated the rule Aug. 30, 2021, the agencies began interpreting “waters of the United States” consistent with the pre-2015 regulatory regime.

The EPA and Corps announced Nov. 18, 2021, the signing of a proposed rule to revise the definition of WOTUS. The proposed rule was published Dec. 7, 2021, in the Federal Register. The public comment period continues until Feb. 7.

ELIZABETH CITY – Cotton has not been king in North Carolina for more than 100 years. By 1915, the boll weevil had finally found its way to the state’s farms and the destructive pest, coupled with falling prices in world markets, led farmers to begin turning to other crops.

In North Carolina, the alternative crop was soybeans. Farmers had already been planting soybeans, mostly as feed for livestock and domestic fowl, but by 1915 soybean had become an important commodity crop — so important that, for a brief period of time, North Carolina was the No. 1 producer in the country. Today it ranks 17^th.

In the northeastern corner of the state, soybeans really found a home, so much so that on Dec. 13, 1915, the Elizabeth City Oil and Fertilizer Co. did something no one else in the United States had ever done before. They converted the machinery they had been using to process cotton seeds into cottonseed oil to produce the first commercially available soybean oil in the country. In that first run, the company crushed 20,000 bushels of soybean.

Soybeans are still king in the northeastern corner of the state. Farmers in almost all of North Carolina’s 100 counties plant soybeans. In 2017, Pasquotank ranked fifth in the state, producing 2.5 million bushels. Perquimans County was eighth, harvesting 2 million bushels.

Each year, the Pasquotank County Cooperative Extension hosts a regional Soybean Festival, bringing together farmers from Camden, Currituck, Pasquotank, and Perquimans counties. Held earlier this month on the campus of Elizabeth City State University, it’s as much a social gathering and dinner as it is a festival. Neighbors say “hi” to neighbors and catch up on what’s happening a few miles down the road.

There’s a brief awards ceremony to recognize the region’s most productive farmers. Doug and Billy Mercer of Pasquotank County have taken that award home two years running, this year producing 90.1 bushels per acre. Temple Family Farms in Pasquotank County was awarded this year for the most efficient or lowest cost for their yield in the region and the state.

The event also includes fried chicken and pulled pork, and there’s an award ceremony for soybean posters created by fourth-graders at area schools. There’s also entertainment, this year it was an Elvis impersonator, A.J. Outlaw, regional manager for Coastal AgroBusiness, and the entire event was family oriented, reflecting the lack of corporate farms raising soybeans in northeastern North Carolina.

Faytie Johnston grew up just outside of Moyock in Currituck County. She’s retired now after 25 years as an extension agent in Jones and Pasquotank counties, but her first taste of farming was on the family farm.

“We had soybeans on the farm for quite a number of years,” she recalled. “My father, he rotated between corn and soybean. It was a small farm, about 200 acres. That was probably in the ’40s.”

The farm is no longer there, but Johnston’s experience is typical in an area where family farms dominate.

Wesley Moore is a third-generation farmer living just outside of Elizabeth City on the road to Weeksville. He has, as he said of farming, “… been around it my entire life.”

“My father farmed. My grandfather farmed. I got out of high school and I’ve been doing this for 43 years,” he added.

The family farm is about 600 acres, “a large small farm,” as he described it.

And it’s productive.

“There’s some really good soil around here,” he said.

Pasquotank County Agricultural Extension Agent Al Wood agreed.

“This part of the state is the most productive for soybean,” Wood said. “We’ve got some acres as productive as (those in) the Midwest.”

But despite the fertile soil, 2018 was a difficult year for soybean farmers. Record rainfall in July wreaked havoc with plant development. Moore said he was able to harvest his crop, but the yield was down 25 percent. And then came China’s embargo on U.S. soybeans, retaliation last summer for the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese products.

“The biggest worry are our problems with our trading partners,” Moore said. “We’ve got to get along with everyone.”

He pointed out that the international market for soybeans is complex. China is the world’s largest consumer of soybeans and for years was the largest market for U.S. soybeans, but other markets exist.

“You’re never going to replace what China bought in 2018,” he said. “If Brazil is selling to China, then we can pick up some of their customers – India and a number of other countries.”

Despite the problems of 2018, soybean will still be going in the ground later this year.

“We’re still going to plant soybean. It’s such a big crop to us,” Moore said.

He noted that the past two years had been wetter than normal, so farmers are about due for a more typical year. And, somehow, the trade issues will get resolved, Moore said.

“Farmers, if they weren’t optimists, they wouldn’t be farmers,” he said.