How one farming practice helped during Hurricane Helene — and how it could curb climate change

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — When Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina, towns like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure were hit hard. The French Broad River overflowed, inundating streets and homes, and leaving communities to clean up and rebuild. The storm left behind a changed landscape—one that researchers say offers insight into both the problem of climate change and a possible solution.

Jacob Hagedorn, an assistant professor at UNC Asheville, studies biogeochemistry and environmental systems. He says Helene fits into a larger pattern of climate-driven weather events that are intensifying and becoming more frequent.

“We've seen natural disasters, billion-dollar natural disaster events, accounting for inflation, increase by at least two to sixfold in the past 5 years,” Hagedorn said. “Those extreme events are going to cost us more money are going to um lead to more danger.”

Climate change, he says, amplifies natural disasters. And the damage it causes—like widespread loss of tree cover—can make future events even worse.

In Buncombe County alone, nearly 40% of trees were damaged or downed during Hurricane Helene, according to Forest Service reports. That loss isn’t just aesthetic—trees play a major role in carbon storage, helping remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil.

“Any time that you can keep a forest, keep trees intact, you're keeping that pump of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil alive, so that's gonna help mitigate emissions,” Hagedorn said.

The result is a feedback loop: more carbon emissions fuel more climate change, leading to stronger storms that take out more trees and more carbon emissions.

Hagedorn believes the key to addressing climate change now is mitigation.

“The number one thing we can do to mitigate climate change is to reduce emissions via less consumption,” Hagedorn said. “Electrification and industrial practices are changing, agricultural practices are changing. However, they can modify to reduce emissions, that's gonna be the key to climate change mitigation.”

One of the top strategies gaining traction is a farming method called adaptive grazing, also known as regenerative grazing. The idea is to rotate animals across different pasture sections in a way that mimics how herds move in nature, giving grass time to regrow, building deep roots, and improving soil health.

That technique is the focus of Roots So Deep, a four-part documentary series by filmmaker and researcher Peter Byck. The series follows farmers and scientists working together to study whether adaptive grazing outperforms conventional grazing on a range of climate and environmental metrics.

“I was asked myself what one thing now of all the solutions to climate change that we studied, what one thing would I focus on, and it was soils,” Byck said.

Byck has spent over a decade studying climate solutions and said soil health has become his “north star.” His work shows that regenerative grazing not only helps pull carbon from the air, but it also makes farms more resilient to extreme weather like floods and droughts.

“People want to know how to lessen the impact of Mother Nature at this point. Using Mother Nature in the way we grow our food is, to me, it's the best method we can think of,” Byck said.

Hickory Nut Gap Farms in Fairview, North Carolina, practices regenerative grazing and saw the benefits firsthand when Hurricane Helene hit.

“Essentially, we had no erosion except for the roads and around the creeks, it's just flooded everything, so it's pretty cool,” Jamie Ager, CEO of Hickory Nut Gap Farms said.

Ager says regenerative grazing is more difficult and more time-consuming, but it is worth it.

“The scientific evidence is that climate change is here, it has been and will continue to be,” Hagedorn said. “Whatever strategy it takes to cut emissions—that should be the number one priority.”