Tobacco Road Now Paved With Scorn

The familiar fragrance of cured tobacco enveloped Keith Parrish as he arrived at the auction. He quickly said his howdies and then scooted over to the row of 200-pound mounds of leaves he aimed to sell.

He likes to get there early, to pretty up his wares. Lord knows his tobacco could use some help today. Hurricane Fran, “the worst storm I’ve ever been through in my life,” killed one-third of his crop. Much of the tobacco now waiting to be sold was blackened and shriveled, damaged by the storm.

But Fran was only the latest in a series of woes that has befallen Tobacco Road of late. Natural calamities, foreign competition and, especially, changing political tides threaten the livelihoods of farmers as never before. President Clinton in August declared nicotine addictive and said the Food and Drug Administration would strictly regulate tobacco advertising and minors’ access to cigarettes and smokeless products.

The move, coming on top of hundreds of smoking-related lawsuits across the country, has heightened the concerns of growers. Many are like Parrish, lifelong farmers who entered the profession because it is what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers did. It was considered honorable work then. It bound families together and instilled a respect for tradition and the land.

But, increasingly, tobacco farmers are viewed with scorn, even here in North Carolina, the nation’s No. 1 tobacco producer.

Just up the road in Durham, a city that was built on tobacco money and that once produced 20% of all U.S. cigarettes, officials have passed an ordinance banning smoking in shopping malls, grocery stores and many work areas. Once billed as “The City of Tobacco,” Durham now calls itself “The City of Medicine.” One in three residents works in health-related fields in the city, which has more than 300 medical companies and organizations.

Tobacco remains a profitable crop, in part because of price supports, a quota system that limits production in an attempt to keep demand high and the basic hardiness of the plant. But many farmers are abandoning the fields nonetheless.

In 1950, North Carolina had 150,764 farmers growing tobacco on 650,500 acres. The crop accounted for 60% of farm income that year. In 1992, the last year for which data are available, only 17,625 farmers grew tobacco on 261,100 acres, according to the state Department of Agriculture. The crop now accounts for about 20% of farm income. The state still produces 52% of domestically grown tobacco. But two years ago, hogs passed tobacco as North Carolina’s leading agricultural product.

The vast majority of farmers who still grow tobacco have diversified to other crops because, said the Rev. Val Rosenquist, a Presbyterian minister who has long been involved with farm families, “they don’t know that they can depend on tobacco-growing down the road.”

In the debate over cigarettes, in which Parrish feels everyone and everything connected to tobacco has been demonized, the plight of farmers has been forgotten, he said.

“They don’t think about tobacco families. Tobacco built North Carolina and tobacco built this nation,” said Parrish, 44. “I firmly believe that. We built schools, roads, hospitals, cities--it all came from tobacco money. Take tobacco out of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky and you will kill the economy.”

Cavernous Building

The New Deal Warehouse, one of four warehouses that sells tobacco in the Fuquay-Varina, N.C., area, near Parrish’s farm, is a cavernous building lighted by skylights and open doors.

A government inspector had already looked over and assigned quality ratings to each pile of tobacco that sat in long rows on the warehouse’s concrete floor when Parrish arrived that morning.

“That ain’t good,” the farmer said, looking over the ratings that had been assigned to his offerings.

Buyers normally rely on the ratings when making their bids. Because bad weather this year and last has resulted in an undersupply of tobacco, cigarette manufacturers and exporters have been paying top prices, even for inferior product. But there was no way to guarantee the trend would prevail today.

Parrish went down the row, sprucing up his tobacco, flipping over the top leaves to highlight them.

Banners inside the warehouse proclaim: “Pride in Tobacco.” One sign on the outside of the front office reads: “Enough Is Enough.”

The men gathered inside, many of them smokers or chewers, are bitter over Clinton’s declaration that nicotine is a drug. After all, if cigarettes are “drug-delivery devices,” that seems to put tobacco farmers in the same category as Colombian coca growers. That notion doesn’t sit well with them.

George Abbott, a warehouse owner in South Carolina, wrote an angry letter on the subject to the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer last month: “I have news for you, Mr. President, I am not a drug dealer. Nor is anyone else in the tobacco community. There are probably fewer drug users among tobacco growers than on the White House staff.”

The men of Tobacco Road are particularly incensed at Vice President Al Gore, whom they view as a cynic and a traitor. Gore once owned a tobacco farm in Tennessee, a large tobacco state, yet decried tobacco in a speech in August at the Democratic National Convention, speaking movingly about his sister’s death from lung cancer. Gore continued to have an interest in his family’s tobacco farm after his sister’s death, they note.

Still, despite all the anti-tobacco rhetoric, the lawsuits and threats of increased regulation, Bobby Thomas, the warehouse owner, said he has little fear that the industry will grind to a halt. “There’s too much money in tobacco,” he said.

About 100,000 pounds of tobacco are sold through his warehouse each day of the three-month auction period, he said. Because tobacco produced for domestic use generates $20.50 per pound in excise taxes, Thomas said, the state and federal governments are $2 million richer for each day he operates.

“And I’m just a little guy when it comes to tobacco. The money from tobacco goes to the federal government. If they outlaw tobacco, where are they going to get the money from to pay for all the health stuff?” he said.

Biggest Cash Crop

While profit margins for farmers growing tobacco have fallen, a farmer in this part of the country can earn more money with the crop than with any other. A farmer can net $2,205 on an acre of tobacco that cost $1,885 to grow, according to figures from the federal Department of Agriculture. The same farmer planting soybeans at $95 an acre would net only $76. This year the grower would lose money on corn, watermelons, sweet potatoes, cabbage and tomatoes.

This is not news to Parrish. Like other farmers in the region, he has tried diversifying. He has raised soybeans, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, even primroses, and lost money on all of them. Tobacco covers the losses of those riskier crops.

“There is absolutely nothing else that can keep me on the farm in Harnett County but tobacco,” he said. It’s how he pays his bills, puts food on the table.

He, like the others awaiting the start of the auction, deny that the moderate use of tobacco can lead to ill health.

“I’ve worked years in this warehouse, and I’ve breathed tobacco dust all my life,” said the 57-year-old Thomas, puffing on a fat cigar. “I ought to be dead with lung cancer. You could do away with smoking today and you’re not going to stop lung cancer.”

Parrish agrees, even though his mother died five years ago of the disease.

“We know the heartache,” he said. “It’s a hard way to go.”

His mother had many years of breathing her husband’s cigarette smoke, “but there is no doubt in my mind [that her death] didn’t come from secondhand smoke,” Parrish said. “I believe secondhand smoke is the biggest farce they ever thought of. It’s easy to blame tobacco and smoking for a lot of ailments.”

Parrish gave up smoking a year ago after he developed a persistent cough and began to have trouble breathing. “That’s just me. Some people can [smoke] and some people can’t. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know whether you can do it or not.”

Now he chews tobacco.

Few Admit Doubts

Only a very small percentage of tobacco farmers are morally conflicted over what they do for a living, said Rosenquist, the Tobacco Road minister. And few of those readily admit that they have doubts.

After pastoring what she calls a “tobacco church” near Raleigh for five years, Rosenquist earlier this year joined the Duke Endowment, a foundation created in 1924 by tobacco magnate James B. Duke, where she has continued her work on rural and farm problems.

“It’s not just the health implications and moral issues that we need to be concerned with,” she said. “You can’t turn your back on people’s lifeblood. You can’t just tell farmers to grow something else.

“There’s got to be a whole concerted effort to find what needs to be grown, what are the market and technological implications of that and financial support for that. Nobody can stop growing tobacco unless they have something to replace it with--or that’s financial suicide.”

Her church hosted a conference financed in part by the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church that brought health experts, farmers and others together to talk about the economic prospects of tobacco farming and to explore alternative crops.

And the North Carolina Council of Churches is funding a study of the plight of tobacco farmers, in hopes of easing their transition to other crops.

Auction Ends Quickly

The auction, once it begins, is over quickly. The auctioneer walked between the aisles of tobacco. The buyers walked with him, all of them holding fingers in the air, bidding on everything without pausing even once to look more closely at the product.

Afterward, Thomas said all of the tobacco in the warehouse fetched the same price--$1.92 per pound. It was the eighth day in a row that the buyers paid top dollar for everything. Prices are high because tobacco supplies are 15%-20% short.

Parrish calls it allocating tobacco, not auctioning, because the auctioneer determines which buyer gets what quantity of tobacco based on the amount of their past purchases.

“There’s some tobacco out here that’s not worth $1.92,” he said. “But they’re buying it. They’re not looking at it.”

After the auction he waits around a few minutes and picks up his checks. One is for $4,356.30 for 2,359 pounds of tobacco. He also sold an additional 1,196 pounds for another family whose tobacco allotment he works. For that he received $2,208.38, which he split with the family.

Parrish has lost track of how many generations of his family have been farmers. He learned it from his father. Now 74 and retired, Rupert Parrish said farming was passed on to him by his father.

Back in Rupert Parrish’s day, however, tobacco farmers were respected. Changing attitudes trouble him. Everywhere, almost, there are “no smoking” signs.

There is a possibility that Keith will be the last Parrish to take up farming as a profession.

His two sons, ages 21 and 16, began working on the farm when they were small. The older is now in college, studying engineering. The younger still works on the farm but also plans to go to college. Both say they have no interest in making farming their profession or in taking over the farm when their father retires.

Despite the criticism of tobacco, and despite the hard work and difficulties, Keith Parrish still considers farming to be a good way of life.

Because it is so labor-intensive and requires the participation of everyone in the family as well as the small work crew he hires, “It’s the type of thing in my view that brings on a lot of family values,” he said.

His children, he said, have benefited from life on the farm. “It’s a good way for them to learn about the real world. Instead of taking out the trash one day a week and getting paid a $20 allowance, they actually work.

“It’s been tough, but I’m proud to hold on to it. I don’t make a lot of money, but I’m still a farmer.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.