PLAINS — It was a sunny Saturday for the annual peanut festival here, three days shy of the 100th birthday of former President Jimmy Carter, the town’s most famous resident.
But this year, amid the celebration, there was also a somber feeling among some attendees. Less than 48 hours earlier, Hurricane Helene crossed into Georgia. While this rural southwest Georgia town escaped major damage, the historic storm triggered power outages, leveled trees and damaged crops across swathes of the state.
The 26th Plains Peanut Festival was a temporary reprieve from the likely financial woes that waited at home for many of the farmers who traveled here and typically rejoice in the harvest season at the gathering.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Tommy Holland, who co-owns H&H Farm near Vidalia with his brother. “We’ve been completely wiped out.”
Gusts from Helene’s winds knocked the roofs and walls off his storage warehouses and shattered equipment the brothers use on their 325-acre tobacco farm about 150 miles east of Plains. Recouping the $2 million he estimates has been lost from the storm will depend upon an assessment from his crop insurer.
If he doesn’t get enough money back, “we’re wondering how we’re going to make things work,” said Holland. “We’re in a bad way.”
The only reason he separated himself from the farm Saturday, where he said he’s been living without electricity for days, was because his granddaughter earned second place in the festival’s postcard contest, with a drawing featuring a large, golden-brown peanut in the center.
A handful of floats, including one with a 14-year-old boy who sang Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” and Miss Georgia Peanut Queens, filed one after the other in a small parade along Main Street in the town’s center. Several farmers, riding their tractors, handed out packets of peanuts to the crowd.
Across the state, only 20% of all crops had been harvested when the storm hit, estimated Tyron Spearman, master of ceremonies for the annual parade and executive director of the National Peanut Buying Points Association.
Spearman predicted it will take many farmers a week before they can get back into the field and dig up their crops. But by that point, many of the peanuts may have fallen off their vine.
“With older peanuts, if it’s moist at all, they will fall off. Plus, you’ll get poor quality so that’ll reduce the amount of money you’ll receive,” he said.
Those who farm cotton and pecans in the state are likely to face even greater losses, since those crops are especially delicate, he said.
What would most help farmers, Spearman said, is for the U.S. Congress to pass a new Farm Bill, which could update the selling rates farmers receive for their crops. President Joe Biden signed an extension of the 2018 Farm Bill in November, but it’s set to expire Monday.
“The most important thing that we’re doing is we’re trying to get a farm bill passed,” said Kenneth Cutts, the chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Democrat serving Georgia’s 2nd Congressional District.
Bishop didn’t attend the festival this year, prompting criticism from Republican Wayne Johnson, who is challenging Bishop for his congressional seat.
However, when it comes to Carter, the 39th president, and a Democrat whom Johnson said he’s known for 25 years, he has nothing but praise.
“Jimmy Carter has brought so much attention and so much international global awareness to southwest Georgia,” he said. “Anytime you go into a foreign country, they know the peanut because of President Carter. He gives us a good image.”
Carter engenders a high level of bipartisan respect throughout the state, and particularly in South Georgia, a rarity in this era of intense political divisiveness.
“He’s always recognized as a Democrat and he always will be,” Johnson said. But “it doesn’t matter what it is, if he’s in favor of it, it’s kind of nonpartisan.”
And it seems almost everyone in Plains has a connection to Carter, a former peanut farmer. Nancy Spicer said she provided meals to him and the late first lady Rosalynn Carter on the first day of every month for about four years.
He was warm and down-to-earth, she said, but she’d have moments where she thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m talking to the president.”
Carter, who turns 100 on Tuesday, did not appear at this year’s parade. He has been in home hospice in Plains since February 2023.
He and Rosalynn made a surprise, short appearance at last year’s festival, the final time they were seen in public together before she died in November. He hasn’t been seen publicly since her funeral, but Spearman led the crowd in singing, “Happy Birthday” so loudly “he could hear it in his home.”
Many will gather in Plains again on Tuesday to pay tribute to Carter. Several events are planned, including a Navy jet flyover, naturalization ceremony for 100 new citizens and a concert.
Still, Carter’s political influence — 43 years after he left office — has its limits.
Blake Lastinger, who lives near Thomasville, said Carter is a “great guy” and his accomplishments following his presidency, including working to almost eliminate the Guinea worm, are “admirable.”
He began visiting Plains and attending Maranatha Baptist Church, where Carter had been a regular, about five years ago and got to know more about the Carter couple.
“You’d never know he is a president, if it weren’t for the Secret Service behind him,” said Lastinger, 31, who wore a “Happy 100th Birthday Jimmy” button on his shirt. “He hasn’t swayed from where he came from. He shakes hands with you and treats everyone like family.”
But Lastinger, a registered Republican, said he still hasn’t made a decision on whom he plans to vote for in the upcoming presidential election.
“I’ll probably write in someone’s name,” he said.
For both the November presidential election and the next harvest season, many attendees said they’re holding their breath to see what’s to come.
