Blueberry farmers still face Helene recovery one year later

Alma, Ga. (WTOC) - Farmers across the Southeast region are still recovering from Hurricane Helene nearly one year later.

WTOC has been recognizing the resilient cities and counties hit hardest by one of the most destructive hurricanes our area has seen in decades.

Team WTOC walked the blueberry fields of Bacon County to see how they’re doing.

Jamie: What do you think the hardest part of recovery was?

Danny Turner: I think that’s the hardest part is. We’re still recovering.

Crews have long since removed trees that Helene brought crashing down, but Bacon County Emergency Manager Danny Turner still has a lot of work to do off the streets Alma.

“Literally city and county had every road blocked.” said Turner. He remembers that night vividly. “The at times, almost deafening wind volume, I never thought the wind could sound as loud as that. You could hear just constantly trees breaking and falling and thuds of huge trees hitting the ground.”

The debris field was the entire county, 1.1 million cubic yards. Turner attributed their faster than other counties’ clean up to burning their debris.

“We knew that just our neighboring county had a huge chip mill, but we also knew that they had a lot of debris that would overwhelm their mill just from that one county, so we chose to do the burning.” Said Turner.

He said they were finished with their clean up whereas other were just getting started with the chipping and the grinding.

From stacks of debris to stacks of paper work regarding road repairs and debris removal, he is still crossing t’s and dotting i’s to get FEMA money.

From people to plants, recovery quickly turned to the fields of Bacon County because blueberries are the very important crop here. Alma is the blueberry capital of Georgia. One farmer we spoke to said it was an uphill battle just to get to his fields.

Lane Wade, Owner/Operator Alma Berry Farms said, “Many a times we had to cut our way in or walk in through the back woods trying to find a way to get in so we could start checking on that.”

Wade has been farming blueberries for 40 years. 2024 was rough on his crop. He points to one area of his field and says, “That was one of the houses we had to redo, because it had fallen in. That was a house we actually had 80 thousand young plants in it, and we lost all of those. 80 thousand.”

But there was no time to be sad about the loss, Wade had to move quickly to get irrigation to the surviving crop without the help of electricity.

“Most of my nursery runs off a big well. We managed to turn around and put generators on small wells. We started the Saturday, no the Sunday after Helene we spend all day long working on diverting water underground.” Said Wade.

Lane says with all of that, this year’s harvest wasn’t horrible. But their recovery continues as they are growing back next year’s crop right now.

“Also starting to address the fields that we’re having to replant heavy percentage of because of the storm.” He sighs optimistically, “We’re not sure what the full effect of Helene really is. It’s still ongoing some, the worst is over but it’s still ongoing.”

Next time you’re in the grocery store looking for blueberries, if you see the Naturipe label, there’s a good chance those berries came from Lane Wade’s farms in Bacon County.