(The Center Square) – As he enters his 21st year as North Carolina agriculture commissioner, Steve Troxler on Thursday remembered the tumultuous year just past.
There was a devastating hurricane, flooding, forest fires, an avian flu outbreak and continuing staffing shortages at the state Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services.
If somehow he could have predicted all those events, would he still have run for a sixth term?
“There’s a job to be done,” Troxler said with affirmation.
When Hurricane Helene hit the state in late September, it was a combination of disasters, Troxler said. The storm brought not only high winds but massive rain and flooding.
“Grocery stores washing away,” Troxler said. “Flooded food stores. Flooded gas stations. Those are all under the Department of Agriculture. We had to go in and make sure no adulterated products were sold.”
Roads – private and public – were washed out.
The Department of Agriculture even opened a relief center for those who had lost their homes, housing 350 people and their pets.
“We touch people’s lives all day every day,” the commissioner said. “That’s what we are there for.”
Helene was a “sneaky” disaster, Troxler said.
“Before when he had Hurricane Florence and Matthew, you could see 36 inches of water on the ground,” and river systems that overflowed, the commissioner said.
Helene was too much a combination of drought, too much rain, another drought and then another bout of heavy rain, Troxler said.
Even before Helene, 2024 was not shaping up to be good year for farmers, he added.
“We were going to have to have a record yield for crops” to make a profit, said Troxler. “And of course, that didn’t happen.”
The hurricane inflicted more than $1 billion in crop losses in the state,
And it didn’t stop there. Even crops that were not destroyed were difficult to harvest.
Private roads that farmers used to harvest their Christmas trees washed out.
“Any kind of private transportation has been very, very difficult,” said Troxler.
Compounding the problem was that roads that would be used by the U.S. Forest Service to fight fires were also destroyed.
The state is on “pins and needles” worried that forest fires could erupt this spring, he added.
“The water would be the first disaster, then the fires would come in almost right behind it,” said Troxler. “That sounds almost biblical.”
