The spread of antibiotic resistance, a growing threat to global health that causes millions of deaths annually, is typically blamed on the overuse of drugs in hospitals and in the food industry. However, a new study published in Nature Microbiology suggests that normal geological processes could be accelerating the development of new resistances.
Soil microorganisms naturally produce antibiotics as a form of chemical warfare to compete with each other. When soils dry out, these natural compounds become more concentrated because there is less water to dilute them. Like a dosage increase, this concentration can create a harsher environment, killing sensitive microbes and sparing those with the capacity to resist. This phenomenon, in turn, is an evolutive driver that favors the appearance of new and more effective resistance genes.
“If you have more antibiotics in your environment, only the organisms that can withstand it…can resist it.”
To test whether this mechanism is having real genetic effects, Xiaoyu Shan, a microbial ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and colleagues looked at soil samples under controlled conditions as the samples transitioned from a wet state to a desiccated one. They found that as the soil dried, the presence of genes related to antibiotic production and resistance spiked, suggesting that drought leads to a rapid escalation in the subterranean biological arms race. Importantly, they did not look for pathogenic bacteria specifically, only for resistance genes, which can be present in a variety of microbes, whether those microbes are pathogenic or not.
“Drought leads to this elevation of antibiotic producers and bacteria that are resistant,” said team member Dianne Newman, a professor of biology and geobiology also at Caltech. “It’s a pretty simple idea: If you have more antibiotics in your environment, only the organisms that can withstand it…can resist it.”
Alternative Explanations
However, there could be other potential explanations for the observed increase in antibiotic-producing and antibiotic resistance genes, according to Enrique Monte, a microbiologist at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain who wasn’t involved with the new study. For instance, arid soils are naturally more diverse than humid soils, making it common to find a more diverse gene pool in the ground, Monte said. In addition, the mere presence of antibiotic genes might not result in an actual release to the environment, or a release could happen in dosages that are too small to cause noticeable effects. “There are antibiotics that are volatile; they escape into the air, so they never reach a therapeutic concentration to kill others,” Monte said.
The authors, however, took some precautions to show that the increase in antibiotic resistance genes was actually a biological response to environmental stress. For instance, they also tracked other genes that should remain unaffected or decline under desiccation. As expected, genes that are needed for basic survival remained stable, while genes responsible for bacterial movement declined in dry soil, where mobility is restricted. Even some species that were not favored by desiccation saw an increase in resistance-related genes, “which is even stronger evidence,” Shan said.
Geographic Limitations
As the researchers combed through publicly available metagenomic data libraries, they had to select collections with strict control of all variables and in which the only changing factor was water content. That limited the analysis to five locations: two grasslands and a sorghum field in California; a forest in Valais, Switzerland; and a wetland in Nanchang, China.
The scarcity of locations might limit how extrapolable these results are, said Fiona Walsh, a microbiologist at Maynooth University in Ireland who was not involved with the work. “There are thousands of high-quality metagenomes available online with excellent metadata. I would really like to see a comparison where they apply their analysis to a broader map of global metagenomic data to see if they reach the same conclusions,” she said.
From the Soil to the Hospital
Drier regions consistently showed a higher number of resistant bacteria cases in hospitals, even after adjusting for confounding factors such as local income.
The study also suggests that dry soils might be a hidden driver of clinical cases of antibiotic resistance worldwide. The authors combined hospital data on the number of cases of resistant infections from 116 countries with the local aridity index, which measures temperature and precipitation, for each location. They found a strong correlation: Drier regions consistently showed a higher number of resistant bacteria cases in hospitals, even after adjusting for confounding factors such as local income.
However, the authors admitted that this is only a correlation effect and doesn’t prove causation. “It motivates follow-up research to see how environmental concentration weighs against human overuse and poor stewardship,” Newman said.
Even this correlation could be a stretch, according to microbiologist Sara Soto, head of the Global Viral and Bacterial Infections Programme at the Instituto de Salud Global de Barcelona. At the end of the day, she said, the authors have soil data from only five locations in three countries, and they are not tracking the specific bacterial varieties that make people sick, only resistance genes.
For the thesis to be solid, Soto said, the ideal approach would have been to contrast hospital strains from a specific area with soil data from that same region during the same drought episode. “Making such a vast inference—that what happens in the soil of one location affects what happens in a hospital elsewhere—is a big leap,” she said.
The authors, however, point out that resistance genes from soils can eventually make their way into human pathogens. Microbes have the capacity to share genetic material across species—a process known as horizontal gene transfer. In their analysis, the team identified specific resistance sequences that appeared to have been transferred between soil bacteria relatively recently, perhaps within the past decade. How they are reaching hospitals remains a matter for a future study, they said.
As droughts increase in numerous regions in the face of climate change, this selective pressure within soil ecosystems is expected to intensify. Though these findings do not show that drought directly puts drug-resistant pathogens in hospitals, they still suggest that a drying climate could set the scene for an increase in antibiotic resistance, the researchers report.
Citation: Barbuzano, J. (2026), Antibiotic resistance might get a boost from droughts, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260132. Published on 29 April 2026.
Across the western United States, wildfires are increasing in size and intensity. As the climate continues to warm, more extreme wildfires will reshape landscapes and pose a growing risk to human health and natural ecosystems throughout the West.
Climate models, used to predict other effects of climate change, are unable to directly simulate wildfires. Instead, researchers link previously burned areas to climate variables such as temperature, precipitation, drought, and evaporation, then apply those relationships to future climate projections.
Many recent studies have connected higher vapor pressure deficit (VPD)—a measure of atmospheric dryness—to more area burned in previous fires. VPD increases as the temperature rises, so models that rely on it generally predict an increase in wildfire activity as the climate warms.
Cheng et al. raise questions about the role VPD plays in modeling wildfire, suggesting that VPD is a poor measure of fuel dryness at larger scales and overestimates potential burned areas under significant warming conditions. Instead, researchers suggest soil moisture could be a more reliable indicator of fuel dryness and lead to more moderate projections of wildfire increases.
The researchers looked at five forested ecoregions in the western states. Using the Western US MTBS-Interagency wildfire dataset from 1984 to 2020 combined with climate data (temperature, VPD, and soil moisture), the researchers analyzed drivers of the area burned from May through October. They connected this information with output from climate models to look at future burn potential.
VPD-based wildfire predictions increase sharply under warming conditions. These predictions showed that under 3°C of average global warming, 16 times as much land would burn by the end of the century, compared to historical levels. Under 4°C of warming, up to 66 times more land would burn by the end of the century. This “truly massive” increase, the authors say, would mean fires consuming vegetation almost as soon as it regrows.
Soil moisture, on the other hand, provides a more moderate, though still concerning, picture. Under the same warming scenarios, soil moisture changes would lead to an increase in burned area of only 2–3 times that of the historical period. The researchers argue that projections relying on VPD severely exaggerate wildfire risk. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002350, 2026)
Citation: Owen, R. (2026), How much will western wildfires worsen under warming?, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260147. Published on 15 May 2026.
Lead-acid batteries are omnipresent. An integral part of most electric vehicles and all conventional vehicles globally, they also serve as backup energy storage systems in developing countries. But if lead-acid batteries are recycled in smelting units without adequate pollution control measures, they can cause elevated lead pollution that persists in local soils for thousands of years. However, because recycling sites with pollution control measures cost millions of dollars, most efforts are informal and unregulated.
In a recent study, researchers reported that scraping lead-contaminated soil in the vicinity of an abandoned recycling site for used lead-acid batteries and treating it with phosphate was linked to a 22% reduction in the blood lead levels (BLLs) of children who were living close to that site in a Bangladeshi town. The research was published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health.
“Informal battery recycling is rampant in Bangladesh.”
“Informal battery recycling is rampant in Bangladesh,” said study coauthor Mahbubur Rahman, an environmental health scientist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. “Used lead-acid batteries are broken up and smelted in close proximity to residential and agricultural areas, which exposes those communities to lead emissions that contaminate their soil and water sources.”
Rahman and colleagues analyzed the BLLs of 130 children living close to two recycling sites for used lead-acid batteries (ULAB) in the Tangail District of Bangladesh that were abandoned in early 2019. They also assessed the BLLs of 37 children who did not live anywhere near ULAB recycling sites. The researchers then carried out soil remediation efforts at one of the ULAB sites but not the other. Prior to the work, the team members held informational sessions for the community about the dangers of lead pollution so locals could provide informed consent to participate.
The team observed that following remediation efforts, the lead content of the soil in and around the former battery recycling site decreased from more than 20,000 parts per million to less than 400 parts per million, which was considered acceptable by the U.S. EPA when the study was conducted, from 2022 to 2023. (The EPA reduced the limit to 200 parts per million in 2024.)
The researchers collected and cleaned up soil from children’s play areas, roadsides, and courtyards of 68 households that belonged to the intervention group. A year after the lead-contaminated soil was cleaned up, the 89 children from those households had the most significant decreases in their BLLs: from 90.1 to 70.4 micrograms per liter, a decrease of more than 21%.
“We know for sure that the areas close to abandoned ULAB recycling sites are as contaminated as areas around abandoned lead mines.”
The children in the group who lived close to the second abandoned ULAB recycling site, where soil remediation was not conducted, experienced only about an 8.4% decrease in their BLLs, from 88.5 to 81.1 micrograms per liter. The reduction in the control group’s BLLs could be attributed to a government initiative focused on reducing lead levels in turmeric, which was happening over the same time period as the study, Rahman said.
Anne Riederer, an environmental health scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new study, said the dangers of lead exposure from ULAB recycling sites are well documented.
“We know for sure that the areas close to abandoned ULAB recycling sites are as contaminated as areas around abandoned lead mines. This study fits with the bigger picture of what we have learned to date about cleaning up contaminated sites and how that could improve children’s health,” she said.
A Widespread Issue
Similar studies conducted in Brazil and Bangladesh reported 46% and 35% reductions, respectively, in children’s BLLs following soil remediation initiatives around ULAB recycling sites.
Despite those drastic improvements, the children’s BLLs were still far above the World Health Organization’s threshold of 50 micrograms per liter. “This could mean there are other sources of lead exposure, like paints and cookware items,” said Rahman. “Or the persistently high BLLs could be because of chronic and long-term lead exposure, due to which lead gets deposited deep into the bones for several decades, even if [people] move away from toxic sites.”
Rahman explained that while soil remediation is an effective mitigation measure for lowering childhood lead exposure, it is also labor-intensive and expensive. Though the team identified hundreds of toxic sites borne from informal ULAB recycling, it wasn’t possible for them to remediate the soil at every site.
“The reason why this issue is so widespread is [that] informal recycling is cheap,” he said. “That makes the formal sector reluctant to invest in costly pollution control measures.”
—Anuradha Varanasi, Science Writer
Citation: Varanasi, A. (2026), Cleanup of battery recycling sites may lower childhood lead exposure, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260120. Published on 15 April 2026.
Mangrove forests straddle the edge of land and sea along some tropical and subtropical coastlines. These trees and shrubs have distinctive tangles of roots that trap sediment and produce organic matter, forming dense soils and efficiently storing carbon. Though mangroves cover only 1% of Earth’s surface, they store a whopping 15% of global ocean carbon in their trapped soils.
Their location along coastlines means mangroves are at the mercy of changing sea levels and sediment availability. Rising sea levels can drown mangroves or push them landward. At the same time, sediment supplies, belowground root growth, and organic matter accumulation can help build up mangrove soils, allowing forests to keep pace with sea level rise. So over time, will mangroves keep locking carbon into their soils, or will they start losing it?
Iwantoro et al. created a new model that examines the links between coastal processes to investigate vegetation growth and carbon accumulation in mangrove forests.
The researchers modeled a simplified tidal embayment to explore how different rates of sea level rise and sediment supplies would affect the mangroves. In these experiments, they found that carbon accumulation can increase at specific locations as waters rise because the increased water can lead to more mangrove growth—a result that matches existing data. However, when looking at landscape scales, they found sea level rise generally reduces total carbon sequestration through mangrove loss and soil erosion. The results showed that rising sea levels can alter mangroves from carbon storage sinks to carbon emitters.
The findings demonstrate that local trends in carbon sequestration may not be representative of larger-scale outcomes in mangrove forests. The study shows that understanding coastal landscapes as an interconnected system is crucial to understanding how mangroves can respond to climate and human-induced pressures, the researchers say. However, new assessments and approaches are needed to better understand future mangrove vulnerabilities. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF006984, 2026)
Citation: Derouin, S. (2026), Mangroves may be losing their grip on carbon storage as sea levels rise, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260144. Published on 5 June 2026.
Will Runion’s 736-acre cattle and hay farm is tucked into a horseshoe bend of the Nolichucky River in northeast Tennessee. On the morning of Friday, September 27, 2024, he was in the middle of two big projects: building a riverfront campground on his land to bring in tourists and income, and cutting the last of the season’s hay. Hurricane Helene had been arcing up from Florida toward the Appalachian Mountains, carrying heavy rain, and the river was high. Even though the banks seemed to be holding, he decided to move some of his cows and equipment to higher ground.
But the river kept rising. At about 11 a.m., the brown water topped its banks. He and his fiancée, his son-in-law’s parents, and neighbors scrambled to salvage what farm equipment they could, but they were nearly trapped when the quickly expanding river flowed into a low-lying area behind where they were working, cutting them off from dry land.
By afternoon, the river had swollen to some 1,200 feet wide—nearly 10 times its usual size. It “looked just like a lake,” Runion said. Trees snapped in the swift current and neighbors’ barns, roofs, hay bales, and household debris swirled by. The water swallowed Runion’s hay equipment and sent the little white house he’d planned to use as the new campground’s office sailing across a field.
At around 8 p.m., the Nolichucky finally crested and started to recede. Runion found a third of his fields covered in debris, dead fish, and tomatoes from upstream vegetable growers. The flood had gouged two holes the size of football fields in his hay pastures, down to a depth of 12 feet. Other sections of the farm were buried in up to 8 feet of sand or silt.
Flooding from Hurricane Helene brought massive damage to Will Runion’s farm, eroding the land in some places and washing up feet of sand on agricultural fields in other sections. Courtesy of Bryan LeBarre, via Grist
Helene dropped up to 30 inches of rain on southern Appalachia, causing historic flooding and landslides in parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia—a largely rural region where agriculture is a vital economic driver and cultural cornerstone. The mountains make it hard to spread out here, so farms tend to be small, and many growers use flood-prone bottomland because it is flat and fertile. But floods of this magnitude hadn’t hit here in generations. In North Carolina alone, Helene caused an estimated $4.9 billion in damage to the state’s agriculture sector. In Tennessee, agricultural losses were estimated at $1.3 billion. Thousands of farmers lost crops, tools, machinery, barns, buildings, animals, and fences.
“When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge. That was overwhelming.”
More than a year later, growers are also contending with the loss of something more vital, and more difficult to replace: their soil.
Runion knew immediately that his livelihood was ravaged. Without good soil, a farmer can’t farm. “When you see 4 feet of sandy soils on top of your topsoil, you know that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “That was overwhelming.”
He sent drone footage of the damage to Forbes Walker, an environmental soil specialist with University of Tennessee Extension. “How do you fix this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Walker recalled thinking when he got Runion’s email. “How do we fix this?”
Over millennia, floods helped build the fertile land that farmers depend on. But today, climate change is driving more powerful and unpredictable storms. One study found that rainfall associated with Helene was 10 percent heavier due to man-made climate change. Research by the U.S. National Science Foundation suggests that what scientists call “100-year storms” will become three times more likely, and 20 percent more severe, over the next 50 years. What’s more, there’s little solid information about what happens to soil during a flood, or what to do when a farm’s soil is eroded or covered with material from elsewhere—its nutrients washed away and microbial communities disrupted. It’s a blind spot that is becoming more of a liability as storms like Helene become more common.
“None of us had ever seen anything like this before or responded to an emergency like that,” said Stephanie Kulesza, a nutrient and soil scientist at North Carolina State University. “And so we weren’t really prepared for recommendations to provide to producers.”
Soil can take thousands of years to form. Rock is weathered and slowly dissolves into smaller and smaller pieces. As dead leaves, animals, trees, and other plants decompose, they add organic matter and nutrients to the rock. Microorganisms establish themselves in the mix, driving nutrient cycling, aiding with decomposition, and stimulating plant growth; then worms and bugs, like beetles and ants, burrow in the mixture, aerating it. For soils to work well for agriculture, they need the right structure—airy enough to allow water to enter and move through, but not too quickly or too slowly—and sufficient biological and chemical richness, including nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, to nourish crops.
Farmers use synthetic or natural fertilizers to ensure their soil has enough nutrients. They can also introduce practices like no-till—farming without plowing up the ground—to maintain the physical properties of their dirt. Topsoil, the rich, uppermost layer with the most available nutrients for crops, tends to make up less than a foot of the entire soil profile, but it’s crucial for agriculture.
Soil scientist Forbes Walker visits Will Runion’s farm in 2025, examining the deep sandy deposits left behind by Hurricane Helene. Credit: Raffe Lazarian/University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture via Grist
Helene’s floodwaters either washed away significant topsoil or deposited new sediment on top of it on thousands of farms. Some, including one of Runion’s neighbors, saw their fields stripped down to bedrock, or river rock. Runion and others woke to pastures blanketed by feet of sand or stone.
When topsoil is washed away, the necessary nutrients for growing go with it. And when topsoil is covered with sand, farmers can’t get to it. Both scenarios can significantly alter the land’s usability. Topsoil can take decades or centuries to develop, and sand lacks both organic matter and the physical structure to hold water and nutrients. “These aren’t soils yet,” said Kulesza of what Helene left on Runion’s and other farmers’ land. “They are in their infancy now. The clock has been reset.”
Runion had cared for his soils, working to eliminate weeds, adding fertilizer to keep nutrient levels ideal, and lime to control pH. “They were our way of life,” Runion said. “They were our income.”
After the storm, from October to April, he removed debris, bulldozed sand off his fields to get closer to the topsoil, filled holes, and graded uneven land. Crews from the Federal Emergency Management Agency removed and shredded downed trees. He applied for government relief and received close to $1 million in state and federal aid. Runion said he could have easily used all of that money replacing equipment and paying for cleanup labor, fertilizer, and fuel, but he’s trying to stretch the money as much as possible.
By June, it was time to mow the fields that hadn’t flooded. He managed to put up enough bales of hay to feed his herd of 125 cattle, but not enough to sell. In a normal year, hay sales made up about a third of the farm’s income. With months of work behind him and his flooded land still too sandy and generally depleted, he realized the recovery would be a slog.
Runion returned to work on the campground, which he hoped would diversify the family’s earnings. The longer-term plan included a music venue and some hiking trails, and to host weddings and corporate events. After the storm, finishing it took on new urgency. He chose a new spot, about 450 feet upland from the river, and began clearing enough land for 45 camping sites.
One environmental soil specialist described the academic literature on flood-damaged soils as “thin.”
Runion also prepared a parcel of land for Walker, the extension soil specialist, to run tests that could guide his recovery. Last November, soon after the one-year anniversary of Helene, Walker showed me around Runion’s farm.
Working with students, Walker established four experiments over about 300 test plots. He’s looking at how different soil amendments—hay, wood chips, poultry litter, and a charcoal called biochar, to help the soil hold water and fertilizer; and Triple 19, a common plant food with equal parts nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium—affect the growth of wheat and fescue grasses.
When I visited, some of the plots remained mostly bare while, in others, tufts of green had sprouted. “We actually got some stuff to grow,” Walker said.
He described the academic literature on flood-damaged soils as “thin.” While some research and case studies exist on how agricultural soil recovers after a flood, there are few systematic investigations like the one Walker is conducting—on what works, and what does not—particularly in Appalachia, where floods of this magnitude have been historically rare.
When so-called atmospheric rivers spawned devastating floods in the Pacific Northwest and southwestern British Columbia in 2021, Aimé Messiga, a Canadian soil research scientist at the Agassiz Research and Development Centre, found a similar “scarcity of data.” He conducted a detailed review of the existing research and concluded that there was limited long-term monitoring, little understanding of how floods affect nutrients and microorganism communities in the soil, and uncertainties about what the actual impacts of floods on agriculture and crops are. Complicating everything is the variability between different farms, soils, and crops.
“You need decades of accumulated data in order to be able to predict what will happen. We don’t have those data.”
“You need decades of accumulated data in order to be able to predict what will happen,” Messiga said. “We don’t have those data.”
Today, some researchers are attempting to replicate flood conditions in labs to better understand, but field work is rare, Messiga said. There’s little money for it—and in the U.S., the Trump administration has cut funding for climate-related research. In addition, “many among us still look at these events as random,” Messiga said. “They’re not random. They will keep occurring.”
Since 1980, 45 flooding events have caused damages over $1 billion each in the U.S., with more than half of those occurring in the past 15 years. In 2024, flooding in the upper Midwest drowned crops. Repeat events in central California damaged agricultural operations from winter 2022 to spring 2023. Flooding along the Mississippi River in 2019 reduced crop planting by millions of acres. There also have been numerous smaller or more localized floods. One study found nearly 75,000 flash floods in the contiguous U.S. from 1996 to 2017, with increasing frequency in the past 22 years. Flooding frequency and strength is predicted to rise in the years to come due to climate change—a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and leads to stronger rain events—and poor land-use management.
Scientists are also starting to study a new type of event, called “weather whiplash,” when sudden changes occur from one extreme to another, amplifying the effects of the disaster. In Texas in 2025, a flood came after prolonged drought, causing widespread destruction.
For farmers, the effects of flooding on soil may linger for years after the disaster. In 2011, the Missouri River flooded states in the Upper Midwest, including thousands of acres of farmland. Fields were swamped for months with up to 20 feet of water. When the water finally receded, those fields were covered with anywhere from 2 to 20 feet of sand; other fields had washed out holes up to 70 feet deep. It looked like the surface of the moon, said John Wilson, a now-retired educator and agricultural expert who served Burt County, Nebraska, which was particularly hard-hit. “It was just bare soil,” he said. “There was no crop residue whatsoever.”
Wilson led teams that sampled the soil and helped farmers build back. He found that levels of nitrogen and organic matter were low in flooded soils, and fertility suffered when farmers planted their crops. Over about five years, fertility generally improved, but not everywhere. “If you went out today and did a yield map, you could still tell exactly where the erosion was because those areas are not as productive,” Wilson said.
Yield is money for farmers, who already navigate thin margins and, often, years without any profit at all. North Carolina’s strategic plan for agriculture recently enumerated just how thin: Of the state’s “42,500 farms, only 8,000 produce annual gross sales that exceed $100,000 annually. The overwhelming majority … some 23,400, gross less than $10,000 in sales, with only around 40 percent of the farms in the state having a positive net income in 2022.”
As floods increasingly wreck farmland, more researchers are starting to focus on understanding the effects of the floods and how to address them. Most of that work is happening in Asia, Messiga said. But a study in coastal North Carolina, where hurricanes regularly land, found that after a storm there was less organic matter in the soil, including carbon, and a disruption of microbial activity and nutrient cycling. The ground also absorbed water less readily.
Coastal flooding is also driving saltwater into the soil of farmland, making it more saline and unable to sustain crops. A North Carolina State University team has been developing test kits for farmers to sample the salinity of their soils, as well as a set of recommendations for keeping their soil viable. Such local work is important because soils vary greatly from place to place, and findings are not often easily transferable.
Nicole DelCogliano’s farm near Asheville, North Carolina, was wiped out almost entirely by floods from Hurricane Helene in 2024. Courtesy of Nicole DelCogliano via Grist
For now, in the wake of Helene, farmers are relying largely on trial and error to build back what was lost. Nicole DelCogliano has been farming vegetables, flowers, and livestock with her husband on 50 acres on the South Toe River, near Asheville, North Carolina, for 25 years. Helene washed away her barn, tractor, and other infrastructure. Of her 6 acres of vegetable fields, one was covered with several feet of sand, another got a foot, and a third field suffered extensive erosion.
“Our entire operation was wiped out, essentially,” she said.
“It’s not something that can be fixed overnight. This is a long process.”
With the help of some friends with tractors, DelCogliano cleared her main field and spread compost and lime on everything. “There was a mix of guidance about what you should do, like should you disturb the soil, should you not?” she said. “At an instinctual level, we just felt like we got to get the soil covered, we got to get something in the ground.” They sowed rye, a dependable cool season grass, as a cover crop, to protect the soil from erosion and add nutrients.
Karen Blaedow, an agricultural educator in Henderson County, North Carolina, said farmers should expect to put in at least three years of cover cropping before they see results in their soil. “It’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “This is a long process.”
In the spring following the flood, DelCogliano spread various amendments on her least-damaged field, including compost, lime, biochar, and blood and bone meal, which provide nitrogen and phosphorus, respectively. After all that, she and her husband seeded crops.
Their new vegetables came in about two weeks later than normal, but the season was more productive than ever, even though they grew on just 4 instead of 6 acres—“which is pretty amazing,” she said. “When we first started harvesting crops [after Helene], we didn’t yet have power at the farm. I had to dig one of our sinks out of a bank and bleach it and clean it and drag it up to the new barn—that we barely got a roof on—to wash and pack for that first [farmers] market.”
She doesn’t really know what made the year so productive. They planted more intensively to account for the smaller acreage and were able to harness their years of expertise to restart their operation basically from scratch. She also attributes the relative health of her soil to years of organic practices. “We’re dirt farmers,” she said. “Our primary job is to tend the dirt. Because that’s the basis of everything.”
Some farmers who’ve seen good harvests may have gotten a little lucky. Rather than sand, floods dumped silt. Even Runion got silt deposits in one section of his farm. Unlike the sand, the silty layers carry nutrients and create a positive growing environment. “We have a producer we work with and he said it’s the most fertile soil that he’s had in decades,” said Emine Fidan, a biosystems engineering and soil science researcher at the University of Tennessee, who’s also working on Runion’s farm. “And he said it grew the sweetest corn he’s ever had. It was growing just beautifully.”
Runion didn’t plant anything until this past fall. He prepared about 65 acres of the 220 that were underwater. It was slow going; he used a disking machine to till his land but had to stop often to clear sticks and trash and to grade out low spots. He mixed in mulch and planted oats, wheat, and fescue. Walker drove me past one of the fields and it still looked sandy, the grasses just a pale green shadow on the tan land. Runion said the greenery was “struggling to have any vigor about it.” He won’t know for sure how well or poorly the grasses do until spring, their peak growing season.
He considered planting more acreage but decided to wait and see what he learned from Walker’s trials. “It’s a process, and the knowledge we’re gaining there will help on the whole rest of it, too,” Runion said.
This spring, Walker’s team will measure the biomass in each plot as well as the quality of the crop, including how much protein it has and its digestibility. They’ll also be evaluating the soil itself, including its ability to hold water, to determine if any of the treatments improved the structure of the sandy dirt.
One farmer thinks the hay he’ll get in the coming years will be lower-yielding, lower-quality, and will cost more to produce due to the extra prep time, new seeds, and fertilizers.
Preliminary results suggest that, in plots where they put down mulch, the grasses are growing better than in plots with other amendments. The woody debris is reducing erosion and seeds are germinating well and standing up in the rough matrix. Spreading this kind of mulch isn’t an obvious solution, Walker said: Wood chips are a carbon-rich material, but as they break down in the soil they consume nitrogen, which can lead to a deficiency for the crops. But this mulch had sat in piles and started to decompose before it was applied to Runion’s fields, which made it less likely to cause these problems.
Runion had asked FEMA to leave the piles of wood chips on his farm rather than remove them like they normally would. Walker is looking for solutions to the soil problem that not only work but are also accessible. Have a mountain of mulch? Put it to work. Have nearby chicken houses? Maybe their nitrogen-rich manure can help revive flooded fields. His hope is that his team’s research can provide some guidance to farmers who find themselves in similar situations in the future. “I think it will have broad implications for a number of different crops,” including vegetables, Walker said.
Meanwhile, Runion is coming to terms with his situation. He thinks the hay he’ll get in the coming years will be lower-yielding, lower-quality, and will cost more to produce due to the extra prep time, new seeds, and fertilizers. He used to sell a lot of square bales, which tend to contain high-quality grasses and fetch a higher price, but he doesn’t expect to be doing that for a while. He’d initially hoped to have his land back in shape in a year or two. “Now it’s a four- to five-year [plan], I think,” Runion said. “It has been frustrating, and exhausting, too.”
He’s still optimistic, though. On my visit, I watched him grade out the new campground in a large dump truck. Freshly exposed red soil lay open to the sky. He thinks he can get the campground open by late summer or early fall. Over time, he hopes, it will be a more lucrative, and more sustainable, source of income. “The farm is really beautiful,” Runion said. “It still has a lot to offer.”
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