Florence hits tobacco

It will be some time before North Carolina will be able fully to assess the damage caused to tobacco and other crops by Hurricane Florence, but it is likely to be considerable.
Some of the counties harder hit by Florence are located on the southern end of North Carolina’s largest tobacco-growing region, according to a Bloomberg News story yesterday quoting Matthew Vann, assistant professor and tobacco extension specialist at North Carolina State University.
Other large tobacco-growing counties also suffered damage, but not the amount of flooding that was being reported further south, he said.
“There is a fairly wide range in terms of severity when you look specifically at the tobacco-growing regions,” said Vann, who added that it was too early to estimate total losses.
Lynda Loveland, spokeswoman for the North Carolina Farm Bureau agreed. No one was certain how many tobacco, corn, soybean, cotton, peanut and sweet potato fields were still under water or experiencing flooding, she said in an email to Bloomberg.
It would take several days properly to assess crop damage because the water still needed to recede.
Meanwhile, Kim K. LeQuire, co-owner of Kornegay Family Farms and Produce, was quoted as saying that her operation at Princeton, North Carolina, had seen at least 14 inches (36 cm) of rain as of Sunday, and was still experiencing showers.
Some tobacco leaves on tobacco plants had been blown off their stalks by the strong winds and were lying in puddle-filled fields.
Although about 70 percent of her farm’s tobacco crop had been harvested before the hurricane, the damage had affected some of its best-quality leaf.