Watauga County, North Carolina

WATAUGA COUNTY , NORTH CAROL INA get your stuff, and you’re out of there.” “I know that in the first month of the pandemic, their business went up by 358 percent,” Jackson claims. “They went from making a couple thousand dollars a month, to making about $25,000 or more, a month, during high volume times. And one of the interesting things they did with that money was invest it in a program called Double Up Food Bucks, which allows them to use SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka Food Stamps) dollars to go to a local farmers market and buy fresh fruits and vegetables from local producers that doubles the amount of money that they can spend. That used to be ten dollars for a ten dollar match. Now, they are able to get up to $40 dollars a week in matching benefits. The other piece of that is that a lot of our local farmers had severe supply chain disruptions, as everybody did, because of the pandemic. A lot of those producers, who counted on getting their product into restaurants, especially the higher- end restaurants in the resort communities here and around us, didn’t have that ability for awhile. So, the Food Hub became an unbelievably well-timed resource for them to be able to get those goods out in a timely enough fashion to still be able to make something out of it.” Jackson reports that another sector of the local economy that is booming, with plans to grow even more, is healthcare. The Appalachian Regional Healthcare System (ARHS), the leader for healthcare in the High Country, is comprised of two hospitals, thirteen medical practices, the Seby B. Jones Regional Cancer Center, The Rehabilitation Center, The Breast Center, and the Paul H. Broyhill Wellness Center. “Our healthcare system is one of the rarities here in rural North Carolina, especially because it’s not owned by a mega-corporation,” he notes. “They have a multi- county reach, and they actually just embarked upon an expansion of services and physical infrastructure, too.”