President Donald Trump made an appearance in Mills River on Monday, touting a food program designed to reduce food insecurity and retain jobs in North Carolina’s critically important agriculture sector. 

For farmers and agriculture businesses across Western North Carolina, spring is the time to plan and plant for the green season ahead, but uncertainty cultivated by the COVID-19 crisis is complicating that process, often in devastating ways. 

From the mountains to Manteo, it’s easy to see that agriculture is North Carolina’s largest industry, but while driving through or flying over this vast state it’s much harder to see the challenges that threaten it. 

Hemp has only been legal in North Carolina for a couple of years, but already the plant is presenting an issue in the criminal justice system that the legislature is still trying to iron out. 

Though just barely off the ground, a new hemp testing service launched in Asheville is receiving a markedly positive response from Western North Carolina farmers. 

“We’re definitely feeling pretty busy,” said Amanda Vickers, director of the US Botanical Safety Laboratory. “Our phone has started ringing a lot more since we announced this testing, and a lot of people are really excited to be able to hand deliver their samples. It’s looking like this is really something that there is a demand for.”

With a new school year just begun, the 300 students who participate in Waynesville Middle School’s robust agriculture program now have an array of new woodshop equipment at their disposal. 

“In two weeks this will be like Santa’s little helper’s woodshop,” Noal Castater, agriculture teacher at WMS since 2010, said in an interview the Friday before the first day of school. 

For many people the county fair conjures up images of Ferris wheels, carnival games and cotton candy, but here in Western North Carolina the annual events represent a time of year when the region’s agricultural roots get to take center stage. 

Of course there will be the beloved fair foods, carnival rides and children giggling on the Ferris wheel, but there will also be hundreds of gardeners, farmers, agricultural students and others signing up to show off their prized plants, produce and cattle.

An industrial hemp farm will be expanding its operations into the Macon County Business Development Center after commissioners approved a lease agreement for Appalachian Growers. 

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in April 2004.

These days my wife, Elizabeth, and I just play around at gardening in several raised beds situated beside the front deck of our home. This year, she has already put out patches of spinach, peas, and lettuce.  These will be followed in early May by Swiss chard, a few tomato plants and cucumber vines, a “teepee” of pole beans, and eight or so sweet banana peppers. We do get pretty serious in the fall, trying to establish by early September beds of potherbs (rape, turnip greens, kale, etc.) that will serve as cooked greens during the winter months. 

Zac Guy grew up on the back of a tractor. 

His father worked in sales and his mother was a postal carrier, but Guy’s grandfather Louie Reece was a commercial beef farmer, raising cattle as well as the hay and corn silage they needed to thrive on his farm in Bethel.