Kentucky's sMall tobacco farms are fading away

Since his teens, Fritz has sweated through long days in the rafters, hanging the pungent burley leaves to prepare them to be sold for Cigarettes. But this year, the barn is empty of the tobacco that for decades put supper on the table, paid farm bills and helped shape Kentucky's heritage. "When I quit growing it, I knew I would be the last generation," said Fritz, who now raises cattle. Across Kentucky, the sMall tobacco farms that once formed the backbone of the burley crop are fast disappearing. There are fewer than 6,000 farms growing tobacco, just a fraction of the 46,850 farms that grew burley in 1997. The quiet exodus is the result of the end of price-supporting quotas in 2004, falling demand, rising labor costs, farm consolidations and More children leaving family tobacco farms. The shift is reshaping the agricultural landscape. Although Kentucky still grows most of the nation's burley tobacco, its acreage has dwindled from 240,000 in 1997 to 69,000 this year. Some are sticking it out, such as Randy Wade, who still grows nine acres on a sMall family farm. But he knows he's an increasing rarity. "It's a huge change," said Dean Wallace, director of the state's Council on Burley Tobacco. "Tobacco is the reason we've so long had a family farm culture when other states had lost it." Most of those who left tobacco have switched crops, expanded cattle herds, relied on off-farm jobs or retired. Remaining growers are planting More to remain viable, which is shifting production from hilly Eastern Kentucky to the open flatland of the West, said William Snell, a University of Kentucky agricultural economist who studies tobacco. Buyout payments, which compensated farmers for the loss of their quotas, and money from the national tobacco settlement, which provided matching funds for help switching crops or expanding tobacco, have cushioned the blow for many farmers. But some tobacco-reliant rural communities have been pinched by the crop's declining role. "We no longer have tobacco warehouses, and we lost some jobs and taxes," said Richard Whitis, a Pulaski County agriculture agent. "There's fewer agriculture dollars for our fertilizer dealers and suppliers." Nationwide, the end of federal quotas and increased competition from countries such as Brazil have reduced tobacco farms from 56,838 in 2002 to 10,300 today. Tennessee, also a big burley state, has 1,200 farms this year, compared with 8,151 five years ago. "It really was a tradition, and it's been difficult for many farmers to quit," said Daniel Green, coordinator for the Center for Tobacco Grower Research at the University of Tennessee. Loss of a tradition Fritz was 13 when his father gave him his first half-acre of burley to raise. It was 1953, and tobacco was the lifeblood that flowed through Harrison County's 100-year-old farmhouses, black barns nestled in rolling pastures and sMall-town stores selling hardware, seed and farm tools. Tobacco dominated talk outside church on Sundays, and fall warehouse sales were a countywide event. Profits fueled a good Christmas each year. "Tobacco was king," Fritz recalled recently, sipping iced tea in his farmhouse. "You educated your children with it, built schools and hospitals with it. It employed a lot of people" in jobs such as harvest laborers, farm suppliers and stores that survived off tobacco income. His father owned a quota, part of a government system dating to the late 1930s that limited production and boosted prices. Along with some cattle, the good, guaranteed income from a sMall tobacco plot made it the perfect crop for the area's rolling hills. "It was hard work -- nothing harder. It's all hand-tended. But when you put it up in the fall, there was something about it," he said. "You'd get this pride." Fritz eventually took over the farm, growing as much as 28 acres of tobacco. "Me, my wife and two girls raised plants, set the tobacco, tilled the ground, we pretty much did all our own cultivating and sprayed it ourselves," he said. But by the 1990s, things were changing. Tobacco from South America led to declining demand, quotas shrank and harvest labor was increasingly scarce. Fritz feared hiring workers he didn't know on the chance they might be illegal immigrants. "I decided to use a tenant farmer in the late 1990s," he said. Meanwhile, public attitudes toward smoking changed. There were new anti-smoking lawsuits. And domestic cigarette production fell 40 percent between 1996 and 2005. After 2004, when the quota system was scrapped, a buyout paid farmers money over 10 years -- in some cases averaging $20,000 per acre. But tobacco prices quickly fell. With the margin too tight, and his own children uninterested in tobacco, Fritz left tobacco for good a few years back. Farmers adjust to changes The sun is setting as Bob Bedford adjusts his tobacco-leaf belt buckle and walks onto a farm field next to a fork of the Licking River in Harrison County In a spare, no-nonsense manner, Bedford recalls his decades growing tobacco in these fields, which now hold his fledgling nursery's boxwoods, holly trees and ornamental grasses. "Tobacco was just something I'd done all my life," he said. "That first year I didn't grow it, it was an eerie feeling." Bedford grew up on his parents' tobacco farm just three miles away before buying his own spread in the late 1970s. His life flowed through cycles of spring planting, summer tending, fall harvest, weeks of barn curing, before it could be stripped, bunched and sold. "Used to be, first day of tobacco sales was a big event," he said. "The whole family would go whether you had tobacco to sell or not." But when prices fell after 2004, his profits declined. He knew he had raised his last crop of burley. Instead of giving up farming, he used matching funds from the state's tobacco settlement to switch crops. Between 2001 and 2006, the state spent $209 million on 122,000 farmers for equipment or loans to switch to alternatives -- from wine grapes to poultry to More cattle. University of Kentucky professors who have studied the funds say they have been helpful to many farmers, and they will soon present a report to the state. "Thousands of farmers have participated, and it really did help them improve net farm income," said Joel Neaveill, an official with the Governor's Office of Agricultural Policy. Bedford is now making a go of the nursery, which sustains him with the help of his buyout and his wife's off-farm job. But he misses growing tobacco and its dominant role in his county, where tobacco acreage fell 66 percent in the last decade. "You used to run into a farmer and say, 'How much (tobacco) do you grow?' " he said. "Now you run into somebody and you ask, 'Do you still grow?' " One of those that can answer "yes" is Harrison County farmer Jess Burrier. When prices fell and costs rose, he decided to expand from 30 acres to 300 to improve his razor-thin profit margins. "Most tobacco is in rolling terrain, and it's not conducive for row crops like corn," he said. "That's the biggest problem for people that want to remain in agriculture here." Today, however, there are new challenges that come with a larger tobacco farm, such as More expensive fertilizer and increased labor needs. "Tobacco is hand cut, hand hung and stripped by hand," he said. "We have to use legal labor, and it isn't cheap." Post-quota tobacco Perched on a ridge above hills in Robertson County, the tiny town of Mount Olivet is marked by aging homes, a few curio shops and quiet businesses. The county was once among the most tobacco-reliant in the nation. The crop is still grown here, but acreage has dropped 58 percent since 2004 -- and 75 percent since 1999. That has affected everyone from restaurants to suppliers, local officials said. "Everyone's got a tobacco barn not being used" and "most everyone that supplied them, they went under, like the hardware stores carrying seed and supplies," said Billy "Hammer" Allison, the county's judge-executive. "After the buyout, a lot of the farmers tried to carry on, but after one year or two, they saw how hard it was and said forget it," he said. "That really hurt the economy." In Pulaski County, about two-thirds of farmers have dropped tobacco. Although buyout money has softened the impact -- and most farmers had an off-farm part-time job or cattle to rely on -- the decline of tobacco has still affected suppliers, Whitis said. "It was kind of a shock to the system," he said. In Tennessee, similar declines have created economic strain that has "changed entire towns," said Green, of the University of Tennessee. "When tobacco left, there was an infusion of buyout money, but it really wasn't replaced." Some family farms remain Randy Wade's old pickup, its interior plastered with farm dust, squeaks and bounces along a dirt road on his Harrison County farm. He winds past cows drinking from a muddy pond before pulling up to a gate outside a barn that is bursting with brown burley, hanging six to a stick in a series of layers that rise to the rafters. He breaks off a strand to check its readiness to strip. Wade acknowledges he represents an increasingly rare breed -- a tobacco farmer with a nine-acre plot that is tended by his wife and two daughters who just graduated college. "I'm not ready to give up on it yet," he said, explaining that he expanded his cattle and used $15,000 in state aid for a hay shed and feed bins to increase farm efficiency. "Tobacco is hard work, but it's hard to explain. We just love it." Snell said such growers may decline further, and that production will continue to shift away from Eastern Kentucky to larger farms in the West, as tobacco farming is consolidated. And although labor and fertilizer costs are still putting pressure on growers, tobacco will still play an important role in Kentucky, according to Snell and others. Cigarette demand is rising overseas. And More Kentucky farmers are turning to the profitable dark-fired tobacco, which is used for increasingly popular "smokeless" products such as snuff. "Tobacco won't go away in Kentucky," Green said. "But we'll still see the number of farms shrink."