Crops of cotton, tobacco, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and peanuts were flooded. State officials estimate half the cotton crop was lost, and 2.4 million chickens, 500,000 turkeys, and 100,000 hogs were killed.

One of the towns worst hit by the flooding was Princeville, located 15 miles east of Rocky Mount and right next to Tarboro. It was built in the 1960s on bottom land created when a new dam was built. The town was intentionally flooded when the floodgates were opened as the river rose from the hurricane carried rains, but residents were only given a few minutes notice. The entire town has remained underwater for more than 10 days.

Griffin Todd, Jr. a farmer from Zebulon, North Carolina, just west of where the flooding hit, told the Militant he has been to Princeville twice bringing food and clothing collected through his church and is planning to go again. "Princeville is an all-Black town. Many of the people there work in a nearby Bayer plant," he said. "It is completely under water and they will have to rebuild. The people now are staying in schools and moved in with kinfolk."

Andre Richardson, a farmer from Johnston County, also west of the flooded area, has also been helping the people from Princeville. "Some of the hog containment lagoons that broke in the flooding were located right near Princeville. And that waste along with the dead cows and hogs means they will need a lot of clean-up in order to rebuild," he said in a phone interview.

The destruction of massive hog waste lagoons in the flooding confirmed years of warnings by opponents of the massive hog confinement operations. In Duplin County, 2 million gallons of hog waste spilled when a lagoon ruptured in Rose Hill and flowed into a tributary of the northeast Cape Fear River. And hog lagoons in Sampson and Pitt counties overflowed from the heavy rain.

In a September 28 editorial titled "A bleak Harvest," the Raleigh News and Observer lectured, "Those [hog farmers] who do rebuild must not, under any circumstances, put their new hog houses and waste holding ponds in flood plains."

Immigrant workers, most of them from Mexico, are the backbone of agricultural laborers in eastern North Carolina. These workers have been especially hard hit. Some live in camps without transportation or telephones. And there have been reports that immigrant workers have been turned down for emergency food stamps because they do not have Social Security cards, even though the cards are not required to receive aid.

Before the hurricane, farmers were already in bad trouble. Agricultural products are at very low prices. Todd, for example, said soybeans sell for about $4.65 a bushel now, compared with $10 a bushel 10 years ago. Tobacco is $1.48 a pound now compared to $1.90 last year. And this year the growing season went from six weeks of drought to getting all the rain at one time.

Some farmers have some insurance, but in most cases it will cover only a tiny part of their losses from the flood. Disaster relief programs set up by the state and federal governments offer minimal and distorted help. Loans, even at very low interest rates, drive farmers even further into debt, the last thing many farmers want. And the history of discrimination in the disaster relief programs has been well-documented by farmers for years. The rich farmers always get the lion's share of the aid.

Richardson, who is one of the few Black farmers in Johnston County, said that in all the years he has been farming, he never received a disaster loan or grant after other cases of drought and flooding, while neighboring farmers who were white did get the help. "They always said they had run out of funds when I got there."  
 
 
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