Weather and whether wither money crops.

Dry as hell and hot," Jimmy Burch says, watching the sun come up over 1,800 acres he and brothers Bill and Ted farm in Sampson County. Conditions that late-August morning were a replay of the way the crop year started.

In April, soil moisture in Eastern North Carolina dipped to a 100-year low. Then drought disappeared in a drenching. In June, 25 inches of rain flooded Burch's vegetable fields, rotting $150,000 of potatoes and drowning hundreds of acres of peppers, cucumbers and eggplants.

"It was a year of extremes," says James Devine, public-affairs director of the N.C. Department of Agriculture. "If you could farm by averages, it would have been a pretty good year."

North Carolina farms had estimated receipts of $5.4 billion in 1995, not counting wood products. That's down from 1994. Tobacco, for years the leading cash crop, stayed in third place, behind broiler chickens, with an estimated $1.1 billion in sales, and hogs, with roughly $1 billion.

Political efforts to regulate nicotine as a drug might have caused sleepless nights for the state's 13,000 tobacco farmers, but what hit their bank accounts was rain, drought and disease. The flue-cured crop was put at 508 million pounds, down 13% from 1994. Rising prices and export gains held sales roughly equal to 1994's $943 million.

Farmers were even frustrated in attempts to diversify. They planted the most cotton since 1926, nearly 780,000 acres, up 61% from 1994. But drought forced them to plow under 50,000 acres and held the production increase to only 21%, about 1 million bales, says Deputy Agriculture Commissioner Weldon Denny.

Although prices and production were up, hog producers got clobbered on another front. Record rains burst or flooded six waste lagoons in Sampson, Onslow and Duplin counties, dumping 100 million gallons of waste into rivers. The N.C. Division of Environmental Management slapped one of the biggest offenders, Oceanview Farms in Onslow County, with a record $110,000 fine, and in October, Attorney General Mike Easley took Oceanview to court. He came away with a consent decree - backed by a $200,000 bond - in which the company agreed to comply with regulations.

The General Assembly set up a study commission that is scheduled to issue stricter regulations this spring for the 3,340 farms that use lagoons.

But as the farm year wound down, not all news was bad. The nation's eighth-largest farm state is well-diversified, says Paul Dew, executive vice president of the North...