To help decrease the spread of COVID-19, residents across the country, and here in West Virginia, are being asked to stay home, except to get the essentials such as food and medicine. Although the National Grocers Association assures there’s not a food shortage in the U.S., some store shelves are sparse.
As spring unfolds across the Mountain State, the pandemic is driving an influx of West Virginians back to the garden and to some of the state’s local farmers.
WVU Extension Service has seen firsthand the growing interest in planting and tending a garden. The WVU Extension Family Nutrition program runs an online gardening program called Grow This. It’s supported by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.
Interested participants fill out an online survey and get free seeds for four crops. This year the crops are microgreens, peas, tomatoes and butternut squash. The program is open to anyone in West Virginia and, in recent years, a few hundred people have participated.
“This year, within three days of posting the first post for the year, we had over 1,000 people sign up, and we now have over 5,000,” said Kristin McCartney, a public health specialist with the Extension Service.
Credit Courtesy Grow This Facebook
/
In the month since the program went live, more than 25,000 people have requested seeds. McCartney said staff is working from home to fulfill the requests, targeting those most in need.
McCartney’s first post included an image of a victory garden — the war-time morale-booster that encouraged people to plant food at home. In this time of COVID-19, she said the idea of growing more food seems to have resonated with many West Virignians.
“This is the time to pull together as a community and do what we can for ourselves and other people around us,” she said. “Part of that right now is just staying home, and another part is ensuring that our food supplies are secure and people can be fed.”
Credit Courtesy Grow This Facebook
/
A screenshot of the victory garden post made by Grow This.
That’s a role some of the state’s farmers are taking on, according to Fritz Boettner, who heads the Turnrow Appalachian Food Collective located in southern West Virginia. The organization serves as a food hub and helps get produce from dozens of small growers into the hands of schools, restaurants and people across central Appalachia.
Some of the biggest markets for Turnrow growers included restaurants and schools, both of which are largely closed due to the coronavirus. That sent some farmers scrambling to find buyers for truckloads of salad greens, for example.
But during this pandemic, Boettner said a new market is flourishing — regular West Virignians seeking fresh produce. Turnrow has seen record sales from individuals placing orders through their online marketplace.
He thinks it highlights the vital role small farmers play in West Virginia. West Virginia is home to about 20,000 farms, and almost all of them are considered small. Ninety-three percent are family-owned, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We need to think about food security and our food system in West Virginia and central Appalachia will help get us through this.” he said “And I think people are wanting to invest in that.”
Resourceful. Self-reliant. These are some of the values many people who live in the mountains pride themselves on. But could we sustain ourselves? As part of our occasional series “Wild, Wondering, West Virginia,” Lana Lester of Wyoming County submitted her question to the Inside Appalachia team: “Could West Virginia Be Self-Sustaining?” She said she, “always had the feeling that God Blessed West Virginia with all of our natural resources and we have everything there in the state to survive.”
Resourceful. Self-reliant. These are some of the values many people who live in the mountains pride themselves on. But could we sustain ourselves? As part of our occasional series “Wild, Wondering, West Virginia,” Lana Lester of Wyoming County submitted her question to the Inside Appalachia team: “Could West Virginia Be Self-Sustaining?” She said she, “always had the feeling that God Blessed West Virginia with all of our natural resources and we have everything there in the state to survive.”
So, could we survive, on our own? And what would that really look like? We set out to try to find some answers.
Survivalist Store And Some Goats
Our search began outside a survival shop in Cross Lanes, a suburb of Charleston.
In a small pen outside, there was a herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats. “They are small, but they have the highest butter, fat content of any of the dairy goats,” said Bob Keller, the owner of Keller’s Survival Shop. These goats are mostly pets. But if needed, they could provide his family with goat milk.
Roxy Todd stands with a few Nigerian Dwarf goats and talks with their owner Bob Keller, outside his survivalist shop in Cross Lanes, W.Va. Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“They breed, they give birth, they produce milk and as long as you continue to milk them they’ll continue to produce milk,” Keller said.
Goats can also provide meat. Raising goats is just one way people with a small plot of land could be more self-sufficient, Keller said.
“People really don’t realize if you took a 10 by 20 spot in the yard, at home how much food that spot would create.”
Inside his survivalist shop, Keller sells dried food that has a long shelf life, and water purification materials.
“There are people that I know locally that are in the 97 percent self-reliant.”
Some of these people Keller knows might be called “doomsday preppers,” a subgenre of folks who prepare their home to be able to survive on their own, in case of a catastrophic event. But Keller said he sees all ranges of people in his store who are interested in learning to survive without having to go to the store.
“My business in general is going up rapidly.”
Beyond his own business, Keller sees other signs that more people seem to have an interest in self-reliance.
“I mean, even our elementary schools are putting in gardens, right, to teach kids where food comes from. Because the kids don’t know where food comes from,” Keller said.
A child inside a high tunnel garden, managed by Grow Ohio Valley in Wheeling. Credit: Glynis Board/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This lack of knowledge and skills makes people pretty vulnerable, compared to our grandparents or great-grandparents, Keller said. Things like canning, growing food, carpentry and basic mechanics — there is a lot that our West Virginian ancestors understood that we lost.
“I think it’s a product of 21st century America,” Keller said. “We were sold this approach growing up that well, you if there’s a problem go buy the solution.”
But Keller said he thinks people in West Virginia have retained a lot of these skills and knowledge.
“You go to rural areas and those self-sustaining skills and activities are still alive and well. When you look at less densely populated states, you have a lot of this activity going on.”
But it is not only West Virginians who are interested in learning to be more self-reliant. A survey commissioned by the economic analyst website, www.finder.com, found that in 2018 1 in 4 American adults spent up to $2,000 on home renovations to prepare for emergencies. Millennials actually spent the most on survivalist gear. But does that mean that younger people are more prepared? Or are they just shopping as a way to compensate for a lack of hands on know-how?
“You’re seeing some people who are raising their children to be self-reliant. And you’re seeing some people who, who aren’t self-reliant themselves. Of course, they’re not raising their children that way,” Keller said.
Credit: Glynis Board/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Is Global Trade Essential?
But what would it really mean to be self-sustaining, not just individually, but as a state? Like, what if West Virginia broke away from the rest of the country? Or what if a natural or geopolitical disaster suddenly forced us to make it entirely on our own, cut away from the rest of the country or the world? No importing, no exporting and producing everything ourselves.
We sent our question over to economist John Deskins, at West Virginia University, to get his take.
“What was going through my mind? To be honest, I was thinking, ooh, this is a bad idea. If you want my honest opinion?”
On a personal level, Deskins said he gets why this would be appealing.
“If you want to harvest the deer from your backyard, or if you want to grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard, you may be able to do that better than the ones we import from California,” Deskins said. “I’d much rather get a backyard tomato, other than one from the grocery, but people are free to do that.”
As an economist, Deskins thought it would be disastrous if we forced people to buy things that are made locally. Trade is just more efficient, he said, than producing everything ourselves.
“You know, if everyone’s just going it alone, then you don’t really have the opportunity to be really good at something and to capitalize upon your kind of special talent.”
Currently, West Virginia is pretty self-sufficient when it comes to electricity. About 92 percent comes from coal that is mined in the state. Of course, the grid we pull from is a regional grid, so it is possible the electrons you are using right now were not produced by coal. And setting up a new grid that is independent of the rest of the country would take a lot of work, and time. But it is possible as a long-term goal, if the state continues to mine coal.
Five barges full of coal being transported along the Kanawha River in Marmet, W.Va.. The coal is headed to a power plant. Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Apart from electricity, though, West Virginia is not so poised to be self-sufficient. We import roughly $3.4 million worth of goods from out of the country, with mechanical products at the top of the list. Incidentally, a lot of the state’s imports include airplane parts, so we could likely do without those if we were just trying to survive on our own.
But when it comes to what we would eat, the picture is a lot more bleak. Despite Bob Keller’s optimism that we could grow a lot of our own food in a 10 by 20 plot in our yard, West Virginians currently produce just one-seventh what we consume when it comes to food. So we would need to support and incentivize farming.
No More Coffee, No More Chocolate
And we would have to do without a lot of foods that just do not grow well here — like lemons, chocolate and coffee. Not to mention a lot of other things that use raw materials that we just do not have in West Virginia, like cell phones, or EKG machines.
And doing without these things, economist John Deskins argued, means we would have a lower quality of life.
John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University. Credit: Aaron Shackelford/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“I’m saying you have two extremes. One extreme is where individual households are self-sufficient. That is an extreme system that’s like a caveman type system. And then the other end of the extreme is a purely global economy where we have specialization across the entire world, and trade on a grand scheme.”
In the middle of these two extremes, though, Deskins said he could imagine a world where we are still importing and exporting some things, but still producing more stuff and growing more food, in state.
“It’s better than no specialization at all. But it’s not fully capitalizing upon the high level of specialization that we have in a global economy,” Deskins said.
Even as a champion of an economic free-market, Deskins admitted there would be some benefits to being more self-sustaining.
“It would greatly reduce the transportation cost. It would reduce the fuel, and other expenses associated with moving goods. And there might be some environmental benefit associated with that,” Deskins said. It would also be easier to keep a closer eye on health and safety standards.
Still, bottom line, if we want our economy to be strong, global trade is essential.
But, something economists like Deskins do not measure when they talk about quality of life, is the desire to buy local, even if it means at a higher cost. Some people would rather pay more money for a chair made by their neighbor, than buy one online that comes from China. And it is the same with food. Some people like the idea of learning to grow their own corn and perhaps taking it to their neighbor to grind it into cornmeal. And inevitably, this might mean learning to survive with less.
Larry Mustain hold heirloom corn called Bloody Butcher, which he grinds inside his historic mill. Credit: Daniel Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
For another perspective on what it could look like to be more self-sustaining, we spoke with Beth Wheatley, who works with the West Virginia Nature Conservancy.“I see a West Virginia that really uses nature as a driver of economic growth,” Wheatley said. “We’re standing atop a ridgeline in Mingo County; in every direction are mountains— some are thick with forests; others are stripped to rubble and rock. Over here we’re looking at a flat landscape, but still completely surrounded by forest on both sides. And this is very typical of many sites in West Virginia where you have former coal mine lands surrounded by intact forest.”She brought us here, because she said it shows two radically different types of landscapes, both of which are abundant in central Appalachia. And both have potential to help people in West Virginia be more self-sufficient, said Wheatley. “There is so much that we can produce ourselves.”
Aerial video in southern W.Va. Credit: Kara Lofton/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Trump administration is set to sign a deal Wednesday, Jan. 15, with Chinese trade officials for what they call “Phase One” of a trade agreement after…
The Trump administration is set to sign a deal Wednesday, Jan. 15, with Chinese trade officials for what they call “Phase One” of a trade agreement after almost two years of false starts and costly, retaliatory tariffs. Ohio Valley farmers are cautiously optimistic the truce will be a turning point, but some are skeptical about the details about the partial deal.
Reuters reports that officials with knowledge of the deal say China is committing to buy more than $50 billion in U.S. energy supplies and increase purchases of U.S. agricultural goods by $32 billion over two years.
Ray Allan Mackey grows nearly 4000 acres combined of corn and soybeans and sells thousands of hogs every year at his farm near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He said thinks the deal will end up being beneficial, but tariffs will still have a lasting impact on his large operation.
“It’s not going to be back to normal, it’s going to be back to a new normal. So we’ll all have to adjust,” Mackey said. “If everything disappeared tomorrow tariff-wise, it’ll still be a different world.”
The deal will reportedly will not lift U.S. tariffs on $250 billion dollars worth of Chinese imports. Ian Sheldon, the Andersons Chair of Agricultural Marketing, Trade and Policy at the Ohio State University, said regional farmers could still feel financial pain.
“I’m a little bit circumspect about what I think the benefits of this agreement are going to be,” Sheldon said. “From a farming standpoint, I think we’ve been caught slap-bang in the crossfire of this trade war.”
Sheldon said he’s skeptical that the U.S. will be able to produce enough agricultural goods to meet the export goals being reported. American farmers exported about $24 billion worth of agricultural goods to China in 2017, and the deal would see billions of more purchases on top of that baseline.
West Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture Kent Leonhardt said he’s confident the cumulative effect of this partial deal, along with another trade agreement in the works with Canada and Mexico, will be a net positive for regional farmers.
“That helps all farmers in the United States, and that trickles down to West Virginia, obviously,” Leonhardt said. “Most people will take a little pain for a bigger gain.”
People have been decorating Christmas trees in their homes since the 16th century. It’s a tradition that began in Germany and spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
According to statistics provided by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, about 4.3 million trees are sold in the United States each year and about 20 percent of them come from the Tar Heel state. All of their top growing counties are in the Appalachian mountains.
But in West Virginia, the industry is much smaller and declining. The 2017 Census of Agriculture for West Virginia ranks the Mountain State as 27th in Cultivated Christmas Trees. That same year, West Virginia growers cut nearly 43,000 trees.
Bob Whipkey has been selling Christmas trees since the early 1990s.
Credit Eric Douglas / WVPB
/
WVPB
Bob Whipkey watching customers at his Christmas tree farm.
“I always enjoy watching the people. You get a lot of families coming out and their kids, everybody’s in a good mood, everybody’s joyful,” he said. “I have families who come out and spend the day — just bring a lunch and spend the day just walking around looking at trees and finally getting [one].”.
Whipkey says he sells 200-300 trees each season over about a two week period beginning the day after Thanksgiving. He converted what he calls unusable farm land on the side of a hill to plant trees. The process takes seven to eight years until the trees are ready for harvest.
Whipkey explained that the time he has to work the hardest is in mid summer when it’s the hottest.
“You have a window [of] about one month to shear all your trees and you have to do it while the trees are new growth or just putting on a new growth,” he said. “The tree will set more buds to make it come in thicker the next year and it shapes the tree.”
Tree farming can be a lucrative business, according to Whipkey, but after more than 30 years, he is winding down his business due to age and health reasons. He said the number of choose and cut tree growers is declining in West Virginia.
Credit Eric Douglas / WVPB
/
WVPB
Bob Whipkey says he is slowly shutting his tree farm down, due to age and health reasons, but will miss his customers the most.
“We had over 150 growers in the state and we’re down to less than 90 now,” he said. “And choose and cut growers like myself, there’s only about 28-30 of those in the whole state.”
West Virginia has nearly 12 million acres of forested land, but most of that is covered in hardwood, not pine and spruce.
For a lot of people, choosing and cutting your own Christmas tree is a family tradition. Cody Williams is creating a tradition with his own son, based on one he had with his father.
“A couple of years ago, we actually dug up a picture of me and my dad whenever I was probably two or three, but a picture of me and dad cutting down a tree and so I just decided that’s something I definitely wanted to do with my kids,” he said.
Another customer, Sierra Linger, was out at a tree farm recently and said she has a strategy on the best way to find a tree.
“So, I have a thing where when I first get out of the car, I try to pick out the tree that I want before I get to look at them. And then I go see if I’m right. And I did,” she said. “So, this is the very first one that I picked, and I thought it was the prettiest one, the greenest and it smelled the best.”
Sierra said she hopes Christmas tree farms will be around for years.
“I love it. It’s something that I want to continue to do,” she said. “When I get older, get married and have kids, I want to come pick out a tree. It’s a big part of the Christmas tradition and I really love it.”
— Across a vast expanse of the South stretching from Texas to Maryland, there are growing concerns for the cattle, cotton and corn amid a worsening…
— Across a vast expanse of the South stretching from Texas to Maryland, there are growing concerns for the cattle, cotton and corn amid a worsening drought fueled by this summer’s record high temperatures.
One of the bullseyes marking the nation’s driest areas is Bartow County, Georgia, where extreme drought has kicked up buckets of dust and left cattle pastures bare. The farm country northwest of Atlanta is among the hardest hit spots in a dozen Southern states where more than 45 million residents are now living in some type of drought conditions, the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor report shows.
Across the South, the drought has ravaged the pastures where cattle and other livestock feed. The majority of those lands are in either poor or very poor condition in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and West Virginia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in its most recent crop report. Pasture and range conditions were in even worse shape in Virginia, where 71 percent of the land is in poor or very poor shape.
“Looking ahead if we don’t get enough rain and the pastures don’t recover, we’ll be dipping into winter feeding hay before time, or have to liquidate some cattle,” said Dean Bagwell, a cattle farmer in Bartow County.
“It is frustrating with the weather, complicated by cattle prices not as high as we’d like to see them,” he said. “So if you are forced to sell, then you’re going to have less income. It just all plays into the frustration of trying to make a living farming.”
At a farm where people come to see the kangaroos, camels and other wildlife in Cartersville, Georgia, owner Scott Allen points out the “baked mud” and cracked earth in the bed of a small stream near his zebras. The natural spring water is nearly dried up, so he’s using municipal water.
“It’s been probably better than 60 days since we had any precipitation that amounted to anything,” Allen said. “The dust is just relentless.”
Credit Jeff Martin / Associated Press
/
Associated Press
Cracked earth is left behind after an ongoing drought dried up a stream at Pettit Creek Farms in Bartow County, Ga.
The USDA crop report shows nearly a quarter of the cotton crop is in poor or very poor condition in Texas, where more than 13 million people — more than half the state’s population — are experiencing drought conditions, the center reported. Extreme drought spread into several new areas of central and eastern Texas in recent weeks.
The situation is also dire in North Carolina, where 40 percent of the cotton and 30 percent of the corn is in poor or very poor shape. In Georgia, nearly 20 percent of the peanut crop is in poor or very poor condition, the report shows.
The heat has played a large factor, forecasters say. In August, high temperatures and humidity sent the heat index soaring across the South. The heat index — what it actually feels like — rose to 121 degrees in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on Aug. 12. And that heat stuck around, carrying record high temperatures into October. Several Alabama cities this year have seen their hottest October temperature ever recorded.
The combination of dry weather and intense heat can create drought conditions relatively quickly, resulting in a “flash drought.”
The term came about during a 2001 drought in the Great Plains. Mark Svoboda, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, was looking for a way to describe the rapid onset of that drought and came up with “flash drought,” he recalls. The phrase resonated with people and made headlines in The Omaha World-Herald’s coverage of that drought. Back then, Svoboda and other scientists had few tools to track flash droughts. Within the past decade, however, satellite imagery has given forecasters much better data to monitor a rapidly-spreading drought, Svoboda said.
In coming years, climate change is expected to intensify droughts and increase their frequency, scientists warned in the National Climate Assessment released by the White House last year. And heat waves are expected to hit the South harder than other regions.
Cities with a particularly high risk of future heat waves include Memphis, Tennessee; and Raleigh, North Carolina. New Orleans and Birmingham, Alabama, are also cited in the report as having trends toward more intense and frequent heat waves.
A new report on the drought is expected later Thursday showing the damage already done, but now Bagwell and other farmers are concerned about the long-term outlook. Octobers are usually among the driest months in the South. There is one hope for farmers: Long-range forecasts point toward above-normal precipitation in the Southeast later this month, according to the Climate Prediction Center.
At the Tri-County Gin in Cartersville, one of the last remaining cotton gins in north Georgia, dust from the Georgia red clay coats the pickup truck where owner David Smith peers over the steering wheel and ponders the dry conditions.
“It’s not a complete, overall disaster, but there are places that are hurting bad,” he said.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture announced Thursday details of a second round of aid totaling $16 billion for farmers affected by the trade war with China. But some Ohio Valley farmers worry about the ongoing consequences of these payments and tariffs.
As with the first round of tariff relief offered last year, farmers will again be paid extra for the soybeans, pork and dairy they produce. But instead of paying farmers a flat rate, USDA officials said these payments will depend on the assessed “trade damage” and the commodity production of each county.
USDA Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation Bill Northey said agency economists first will assess the county-level impact of tariffs. “We then divide that by the acres planted within that county, and then have a [payment] no matter which crops you plant,” he said.
USDA officials say this will more accurately determine the right amount of payments for each farmer. But it also leaves farmers without specifics about how much they might receive from the payments. Specialty crops including cranberries, grapes and tree nuts were also included to be eligible for relief payments.
The new payments are scheduled to be delivered in three phases, the first in July or August.
West Kentucky soybean farmer Jed Clark said while he appreciates these new payments, he’s worried that payments by county might lead to unintended discrepancies in how much each farmer receives.
“I think it will happen, and I think you’ll probably see some pretty drastic cases of it happening,” Clark said. “It’s hard to cover the diversity of farmers and their practices in a county and throw a blanket over that whole county.”
Clark said because these payments give farmers incentive to grow more, it could potentially increase the already large supply of crops such as soybeans, and that could make depressed crop prices even worse for farmers.
Farmers have been facing financial struggles because of low crop prices, caused in part by retaliatory tariffs and the overproduction of crops. Most Ohio Valley farmers hope the new payments cover more of their losses than the last round of payments, but more importantly, they hope to see trade deals struck with China and other countries soon.
“Corn farmers only got a penny per bushel [last time], and that certainly didn’t account for the price loss they’ve had,” Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Spokesperson Brad Reynolds said. “I think those safety nets are there, farmers are glad that they’re there, but they’d rather not rely on programs.”
Central Ohio dairy farmer Chuck Moellendick said for the dairy industry, other trade deals in the works with Mexico and Canada are just as important because of the large supply of milk products that await shipping.
“Mexico’s our biggest exporter,” Mollendick said. “All of those things will disappear a lot quicker without tariffs on them. It makes us a lot more competitive.”
Mexico dropped retaliatory tariffs on U.S. cheese and dairy-based whey products last week after the Trump administration dropped tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminum.
