Turmoil in Tobaccoland

Abstract

Tobacco was the first major commercial crop produced in the United States. The colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, were exporting tobacco to England six years before the Pilgrims stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock, and for nearly four centuries the golden leaf has been one of the nation's leading cash crops. The golden leaf is no longer quite so golden, however, because tobacco farmers in the United States have been under ever-increasing stress since 1964, when the Surgeon General issued the first report that lung cancer may be linked to cigarette smoking. This stress has been especially severe in the Carolinas and Virginia, which produce nearly half of the nation's cigarette tobacco. Tobacco farmers in this area have cast about for alternative agricultural enterprises, but they have been handicapped because no other field crop produces even close to the same gross return per acre as tobacco. In 1992, for example, the average gross value of an acre of tobacco was $3,223; of cotton, $418; of corn, $210; and of soybeans, $185 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1994e, 370, 380). Moreover, any new farming enterprise requires expensive new infrastructural investment in facilities for production, processing, and marketing. Traditionally tobacco farms were small, because the crop required such prodigious amounts of intensive hand labor that a family could handle no more than five to seven acres, and even then they might have to hire additional help at the busiest times of the year. As late as 1950, however, a farm of thirty tillable acres with five to seven acres of tobacco could provide a reasonable livelihood for a family. Tobacco-producing areas thus supported the greatest densities of farm population and the smallest farms in the United States. The farmers grew tobacco in small patches that rarely occupied as much as 10 percent of any farm or county. These patches were intricately intermingled with patches of other crops, pasture, woodland, and swamp. Most tobacco farms have been so small that their operators could not afford to consider any alternative agricultural enterprise, even if one were available, and tobacco farmers have dung tenaciously to the crop that has been their staple and their mainstay. The principal exceptions have been the flue-cured tobacco-producing districts of eastern North Carolina, which have been in almost constant turmoil since World War II, because their farms are large enough to experiment with a variety of possible crops other than tobacco and because their farmers have mustered the necessary entrepreneurial spirit. The use of machines has led farmers to enlarge some of their erstwhile patches into fields, but eastern North Carolina still has one of the nation's most complex mosaics of land uses. LARGER FARMS OF THE NEW BELT The technique of flue-cured tobacco production was developed around the time of the Civil War in the area known as the Old Belt, on the Piedmont along the Virginia-North Carolina line [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Growers cured the leaves by baking them at temperatures up to 200[degrees]F for three or four days in small, squat, cubelike barns heated convectionally by flues of sheet metal that crossed their floors (Hart and Chestang 1991, 4). This curing process produced a golden yellow leaf, also called Bright tobacco because of its color and Virginia tobacco because of its origin, that constitutes roughly half of an average cigarette. Farmers in the New Belt, on the Inner Coastal Plain of eastern North Carolina, began a shift to flue-cured tobacco production in the late 1880s, when the price of cotton dropped disastrously, but they retained the familiar system of sharecropping. Although landholdings in the New Belt were appreciably larger than the small family farms of the Old Belt, their subdivision into sharecropper units disguised their true size, because the census of agriculture insisted on counting sharecropper units as separate farms [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. …

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