A few weeks after Hurricane Florence passed through Charlotte as a tropical storm, things are getting back to normal on area farms. Jesse Leadbetter owns Freshlist, a company that works with local farmers to supply restaurants around town by sourcing from enough farms to ensure a restaurant can reliably get the quantity it needs. I reached out to Leadbetter to ask what he’s been seeing on his trips to farms, post-storm. Brent Barbee, he says, from Barbee Farms lost corn and zucchini. You’ve likely seen Barbee Farms’ name; some Harris Teeter locations carry his products (I saw his sweet potatoes yesterday). Vine crops didn’t fare so well during the storm.

Tomatoes took the biggest hit, becoming waterlogged, which means the fruits split open and have a much shorter shelf life. They’re still edible, but not sellable, so most of them probably went into compost.

“For the most part, everybody made it through, in that there wasn’t damage to the high tunnels or anything like that,” Leadbetter says. High tunnels are used as greenhouses and protection. “It was just the fields being too wet to harvest.”

The amount of rain made the fields too wet to harvest for days after the storm passed, so a lot of produce sat on the vines until the fields dried out recently. Leadbetter says farmers probably lost about two weeks’ worth of product.

At Freshlist, sales were down 25 percent the week of the storm. Farmers already work on tight margins, so a two-week loss can have a serious financial impact. If you are able, try to get to the market this weekend and buy some extra goods. It’s a good time to start cooking up and freezing fall soups and stews.  —Kristen Wile

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