After the Storm: One Apple Grower’s Story Gives Hope

On the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 26, Kenny Barnwell’s biggest concern wasn’t the hurricane named Helene that was building toward Category 4 status in the Gulf of Mexico. Not yet at least. Instead, Barnwell had business on his mind from his home in Edneyville, NC. Specifically, tariffs. In the process, he was fighting for his fellow apple growers across the country — because that’s what an Apple Grower of the Year tends to do. And Barnwell was certainly well deserving of American Fruit Grower’s annual award in 2023.

At this moment, Barnwell was responding to a LinkedIn message that Jim Bair, the President and CEO of USApple, had posted that morning. In a nutshell Bair concluded, “Tariffs make us poorer, not richer.” Further, he stated, “When the target of the tariffs retaliates against U.S. agricultural products, our farmers are hurt as innocent bystanders.”

Bair’s post received mixed opinions, all respectful. Barnwell, for one, could not have agreed more with Bair while noting the added dilemma that farmers face in North Carolina: The state’s quality of life is too good for their own good. Everyone wants to live there, at almost any price. Only Texas has lost more farmland in recent years.

“As an apple grower, I have felt the effect of the tariffs,” Barnwell wrote. “We are, in my area, not able to pick a significant part of our crop, and most of those orchards will be growing houses in the next year or two. Talking about it in the abstract is one thing; living it is completely different. It seems there is a never-ending influx of people who want to move to North Carolina. Land prices are high, and profit margins are small to nonexistent, and the tariffs played a part of this.”

Many of you have at least driven through Western North Carolina and its Appalachian Mountains. I visited Edneyville — the “heart of apple country” in Henderson County — in June 2023, tasked with interviewing and photographing Barnwell for the Apple Grower of the Year story. He and his wife, Sandra, were gracious hosts, be it in Kenny’s picturesque orchards or inside their beautiful home, meticulously maintained by Sandra.

The trip left me with nothing but good memories of the region and its people. I could easily understand why someone would want to move there. Which makes it all the more difficult these days to comprehend how quickly things can change, even in paradise.

Hurricane Helene, of course, made landfall in Florida later that Thursday. By Friday morning, what was now a tropical storm had hit Western North Carolina, dumping a catastrophic amount of rain on communities that had been swamped by a storm earlier that week. Hendersonville, just south of Edneyville, received 21.96 inches of rain between Sept. 24 and 28.

At time I wrote this, Helene’s death toll across six states stood at 232, with at least 116 dead in North Carolina. With up to 75 individuals still missing 10 days after the storm, those numbers were expected to increase.

It took me until the night of Sunday, Sept. 29 — upon doing a search on X (Twitter) for the phrase “Edneyville” — to realize the magnitude of the disaster in Barnwell’s hometown as well as the much larger Asheville to the west and, just a short drive north, the small towns of Chimney Rock and Bat Cave, which were reportedly “wiped off the map” by flooding.

I woke up the next day and reluctantly texted Kenny just to see how he and Sandra were doing while asking if American Fruit Grower could help in some way. To my surprise, he responded right away. His message was understandably short and, most importantly, reassuring: “We’re OK, just a lot of damage.”

That was great to see. As Hurricane Helene has demonstrated, things could be a lot worse than a destroyed orchard. Or case of fire blight. Or tariffs. Of course, they could be a lot better, too. They usually are in North Carolina.

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Hurricane Recovery Assistance

As recovery continues in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, Meister Media Worldwide strives to provide important grower information and resources for assistance. Click here to explore resources now.