Tough times for farmers, come hell and high water.

• Position: North Carolina

There's an old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery. When asked how he plans to spend his loot, he says he'll just farm until he's used it all up. Not many North Carolina farmers find the joke funny these days. Hit by falling commodity prices, then a drought followed by storms and floods, along with a national assault on tobacco, they have been struggling to stay afloat - some literally.

The worst came in September, when Hurricane Floyd swept over Eastern North Carolina's farming heartland, washing away crops, flooding buildings and machinery and drowning or starving 28,000 hogs and more than 2.8 million chickens and turkeys. Initial estimates put farming losses at more than $800 million, and the final tally could go higher. Three-quarters of the state's farmland was affected by the storm.

"In certain portions of the state, it is going to totally change the agricultural picture," says Jim Knight, spokesman for the N.C. Department of Agriculture. "In a lot of cases, we will not see these lands put back into production." North Carolina was already losing 2% to 3% of its farmers annually to consolidation and competition. In 2000, the state expects 10% to 15% of its 55,000 farmers to quit.

Some commodities were looking good before Floyd. "We were predicting a record [cotton] crop this year," says Don Ledford, an agricultural statistician with the N.C. Department of Agriculture. "This storm is probably going to wipe that out pretty much." Floyd hit cotton the hardest, with about $140 million of crop losses. Not every crop took a beating, but it wiped out half the state's sweet potatoes and did extensive damage to the pickling-cucumber crop.

Hogs fared better than cotton. Farmers feared hundreds of thousands of hogs would drown or starve. But they were able to find and feed most in time to save the state's 9.9 million herd. A more pressing issue is waste lagoons, which overflowed in the storm and must be rebuilt on higher ground.

Before the storm, hog farmers' biggest problem was a pig glut. Selling into a national oversupply, they watched prices tumble from $59 per hundred weight in July 1997 to about $15 in December 1998. Prices started rising in 1999, reaching $35 in November. Problem is, it costs about $40 to bring a hog to market. At one point, Rose Hill-based Murphy Family Farms Inc., the state's largest and nation's second-largest hog farmer, estimated it was losing $1 million a month.

In February 1999, the pork-price fiasco claimed...