“Disaster doesn’t sort us out by preferences; it drags us into emergencies that require we act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save the neighbors, no matter how we vote or what we do for a living,” writes author Rebecca Solnit in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.  Nowhere is this more true than in farming communities, where farmers engage in both formal and informal mutual aid networks to help their neighbors in times of crisis. This article tells the stories of organizations and ordinary folk who stepped up to support and empower their communities through recent extreme weather events.

Mobilizing for Resilience in Western North Carolina

After Hurricane Helene unleashed unprecedented devastation on Western North Carolina, farm advocacy organizations like Blue Ridge Women In Agriculture (BRWIA) and Organic Growers School (OGS) immediately sprang into action to support affected farmers.

Liz Whiteman, executive director of BRWIA, says their staff began calling farmers in their network as soon as they could. While many of the more than 100 farmers remained safe and experienced minimal damage, others were not as fortunate.

BRWIA’s network mobilized immediately, opening up their walk-in freezers and refrigerators for affected producers to store whatever they needed — from a box of turnips to a whole processed side of beef. Recognizing the immediate need for clean-up assistance, BRWIA released a volunteer sign-up sheet on its website and social channels and received over 500 submissions from NC residents near and far wanting to help. They coordinated 22 workdays on 16 farms, contributing over 700 hours of labor to help farmers in the aftermath of the storm. Volunteers cleared debris, rerouted creeks, cleaned flood-damaged growing beds, rebuilt infrastructure, and more.

“As an organization, we were able to ask people what they needed,” Whiteman says. “And we were able to connect them to the people who could get them the help they needed, even if that wasn’t us.”

One of the many farmers affected was Mary Carroll Dodd of Red Scout Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Black Mountain, NC. Dodd considered herself lucky to have had just minimal structural damage and topsoil runoff and immediately set to work to help others experiencing damage.

“It was kind of a blur. Our main concern was our neighbors,” Dodd says. “We had a lot of produce in the cold room, and because the power was out, we just started to cook. Everything was so overwhelming at the time. I just felt like that was one thing I could do.”

Dodd recounts the immediate days of recovery — gathering in the morning to determine what needed to be done that day — and the help of strangers, volunteers pouring in from across the state with much-needed equipment and a generous spirit. “There was such an outpouring of love and support for our farm and area,” says Dodd.

Dodd was scheduled to attend a Farmers and Ranchers in Action Event in Washington, D.C., just 10 days after the hurricane. She initially balked at attending, given the circumstances, but ultimately decided that Western NC farmers couldn’t afford to be left out of important conversations about their future. 

“I really wanted to be able to share the stories of what was going on with the White House and the USDA,” Dodd says. “I was able to get in touch with nearby farmers and hear about what they had gone through, what they lost, and what they needed.”

Most of the staff of Organic Growers School, including executive director Cameron Farlow, are based in Asheville, NC, which was especially hard hit by the hurricane.

“Without cell service or internet, no one really knew what was going on. You could only talk to who you could physically walk to, so many of us didn’t know the magnitude across the whole area,” Farlow says. “[OGS] was trying to figure out how to leverage our strengths. We have the community, so how can we get the word out to help farmers?”

Knowing its strengths lay in educational efforts and networking, OGS focused on connection. They created and shared crowd-sourced fundraising campaigns for over 35 affected farmers, provided critical information on soil testing after the storm, and planned work days.

In the immediate aftermath of Helene, the nation’s attention and money were rightfully focused on affected areas. But six months later, one year later, once the storm waters have subsided — what remains? Who will be there to carry on the work? 

“I think there is always this need to say ‘it’s over, get it together,’” says Farlow. “But if we want to be able to learn anything from this and really heal, it’s going to take time and acknowledgment and mutual support.”

The takeaways are both existential and practical. Our food systems are fragile. For local food systems especially, Whiteman points out that even if a farm survived with little damage, their farmers markets, restaurants they sell to, and customer base were surely affected. But the affected communities met this fragility with resilience — whether it was mucking out a barn, rebuilding a bridge, or just sitting and sharing.

“It’s all coming back to community,” Farlow says. “That’s who responded, and that’s who showed up.”

“Our systems survive, but they’re really fragile,” says Whiteman. “And we can still do a lot of work to make them more resilient.” DA

Solidarity for Farmworkers Facing Extreme Weather Impacts

When climate-driven disasters hit, farmworkers are often among the first and worst impacted. Working outdoors in extreme conditions, often living in mobile homes in isolated rural areas, and lacking full control over their housing, transportation, and food supply leaves these workers especially vulnerable to events like hurricanes, floods, or extreme temperatures.

Most farmworkers are in the country on temporary H-2A visas, which tie them to a specific employer responsible for providing housing. If weather disasters wipe out a crop, farmworkers on this visa can be sent home early or find themselves without housing or work to earn money for their families. Other farmworkers lack immigration papers and may be unable or hesitant to access help and resources when a disaster hits.

In August 2024, heavy rainfall from Hurricane Debby devastated much of the tobacco and sweet potato harvest in Eastern North Carolina, leaving many farmworkers without work. By the time Hurricane Helene hit in October when migrant farmworkers arrived in the mountains of Western NC for the Christmas tree harvest, many were already struggling with poor food access and lost wages. 

Leticia Zavala, Co-Coordinator at the farmworker-led human rights organization El Futuro es Nuestro (It’s Our Future), describes the confusion farmworkers experienced as Hurricane Helene approached: “We had workers that got a lot of alarms on their phones, but they’re all in English, so they knew something was going on, but they didn’t know what.”

No one was prepared for the scale of Helene’s impact. “Speaking to some growers, we heard there was gonna be a lot of rain and potential for flooding, but we’ve never seen such a disaster in this area. So we kind of didn’t believe it,” says Zavala. “So people didn’t respond too much. And so when it hit, workers were just kind of stranded without phone service, without electricity, and without food.”

El Futuro es Nuestro worked to help farmworkers get food, toiletries, and other essentials. Aid organizations had established food distribution centers, but some growers did not provide their workers with transportation or information on how to access them. Furthermore, the centers lacked food options that were fresh, healthy, or culturally appropriate. “There’s a lot of this American food that we’re getting that we don’t know what to do with. We don’t know what it is,” says Zavala, “Like, there’s no beans. There’s no tortillas.”

Zavala’s organization brought in food donations from pantries and foundations like Church World Service. At the same time, farmworkers and others within the Latine community were stepping up to help their neighbors. “Some of them were working in a tortilla factory and they organized themselves to ask the company to give tortillas, for example. We had Mexican stores and vendors donate beans and things like that.”

Beyond meeting basic needs, Zavala notes that it’s imperative to make sure workers’ rights are protected. Often, during post-disaster recovery, wage theft and labor violations run rampant. These issues often go unreported for fear of retaliation and threats to workers’ immigration status. Following Helene, Zavala says that some workers with protected immigration status stepped up to report violations and protect others in their community.

In addition to acute disasters like Hurricane Helene, farmworkers also face risks from climate impacts that are more difficult to see. Heat stress is a major concern as workers must labor outside amid rising global temperatures, often without breaks or reprieve, according to Zavala. 

“A worker is out in the heat working all day, but then most of the workers are transported in school buses that are not equipped with air conditioning. And then there are no requirements for air conditioning in their housing facilities. So their body just doesn’t have a space to really cool down,” she says. “They’re coming home to overcrowded housing where the temperatures are probably just as bad at night as they were when they were out in the fields. And so being exposed to that in the long run is just dangerous.”

Zavala says that there has been at least one farmworker death from extreme heat exposure in North Carolina every year for the past three years. In the summer of 2024, at least 30 farmworkers were fired or forced to leave their jobs because they could not keep up the pace of work or had to take breaks or receive medical attention due to the heat.

El Futuro es Nuestro offers collective responsibility training for workers. This training helps them recognize the symptoms of heat stress in others, identify their options for medical assistance, and report dangerous working conditions. Thus, it helps build collective resilience in farmworker communities. 

Ultimately, stronger labor rules and enforcement are needed to ensure a safe working environment for farmworkers in the long term. El Futuro es Nuestro is working in coalitions to advocate for stronger protections and preparedness planning. Most recently, they championed an OSHA rule that would guarantee workers the right to a break and require employers to create a plan to control heat hazards in their workplace through measures like cooling centers or altered work schedules. They are also pushing for Spanish-language Emergency Service Alerts and FEMA disaster messaging so immigrant workers have access to all the information they need to prepare for extreme weather. KH

Farm Brigades on the Front Lines of Disaster Response in Puerto Rico

A farm brigade, or brigada, brings a team of people together to provide a farmer with support for labor-intensive work. Farm brigades are a long-standing mutual aid tradition in farming communities in Puerto Rico. They represent exchanges of labor, knowledge, and camaraderie rooted in empathy, trust, and solidarity. The impact of this practice is immeasurable because a well-organized brigade can accomplish a tremendous amount of work on a farm in a short amount of time — an impact that cannot simply be quantified in monetary terms.

Farm brigades are often organized as a quick response action in the face of weather emergencies such as hurricanes, like Hurricane Ernesto in Puerto Rico in August 2024. Drawing on prior experience responding to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, RAFI’s Puerto Rico Farmer Resources Coordinator, Fello Pérez, worked with farmers and partners on the ground to coordinate brigades to support farmers in the aftermath of the storm.

The first step was identifying the regions of the island hardest hit by the hurricane and determining which farmers in those areas required assistance. This assessment identified several affected farms in San Sebastián, Utuado, Jayuya, and Adjuntas. These farms needed help with tasks such as clearing roads to access planting plots, harvesting crops nearing maturity, removing fallen trees and vegetative debris obstructing crop development, repairing broken fences, and replanting fields with impacted crops, among other urgent needs.

Joaquin Alvarez, an experienced farmer/agronomist, was the designated coordinator who communicated with each farmer to schedule dates, outline tasks, and set clear goals for the brigade. Alvarez also activated a team of skilled agricultural workers from Utuado. This approach ensured that the team — equipped with the necessary tools and equipment — could execute the work as efficiently as possible, tailored to the farmer’s specific needs.

The brigades began at 6:00 a.m. with the freshness of the tropical morning. While the brigadas were initially planned to conclude by midday, the farmers’ immense gratitude often led to extending the day. Farmers frequently invited the workers to stay and rest, talk, and enjoy a meal together. Over two months, seven farms (Finca Verde Luz, Hacienda Las Malcriás, Finca Gripiñas, El Guayabito, Finca Belén, Atypica Farm, and San Carmelo de la Plata) were directly supported through this solidarity-driven initiative.

Community participation played a key role in the success of these brigades. Volunteers from the surrounding areas joined in, contributing to various tasks, including preparing meals for the workers. The brigades helped foster a sense of community and camaraderie, with one worker saying, “Hopefully, we can continue with this work through the entire island because, in this way, we are really having a positive impact on farmers.”

For many of the farmers — some of whom had never received this level of hands-on help — the experience was transformative. Most of these farmers work alone or solely with family members, so the brigadas provided a significant morale boost and renewed energy to rebuild and move forward.

“This type of support is more valuable than any grant or monetary aid we could receive,” stated one of the farmers who benefited from the initiative.

The spirit of brigadas exemplifies the power of community and solidarity, a tradition that will continue to thrive for generations to come. FP & ZM