Farmers Confront a Tobaccoless Future

The future of tobacco row may well depend in part on Meathead, Numbskull and the other gentle-eyed goats picking their way through the steep and rocky hills that pass in these parts for a farm.

The tobacco business is bad. And getting worse. Cigarette companies slashed their orders for American-grown tobacco by nearly 30% this year. Taxes on smokes seem sure to rise, which will push demand down even further. So folks out here in the flinty scrabble of eastern Kentucky, where tobacco’s all there’s ever been, are scared.

That’s where the goats fit in.

Desperate to break their addiction to tobacco, Kentucky farmers are testing all sorts of agricultural schemes to pay their bills. They’re making spicy beef jerky and shredding cabbage for use as egg roll filling. They’re raising freshwater shrimp and bees. They’re planting pumpkin patches. And yes, they’re tending goats.

“The state is frantic,” said Neil Hoffman, who owns Meathead, Numbskull and a dozen other ever-bleating goats that he breeds and sells for meat. “There’s always been talk that tobacco’s [reign is] almost over, but now people are starting to believe it.”

Kentucky is not the nation’s top tobacco-producing state; North Carolina is. But Kentucky is the state most dependent on tobacco. The crop brings in close to $1 billion a year and supports 45,000 farmers here.

A Place Where Tobacco Rules

Far beyond its economic impact, however, tobacco is a way of life.

It sustains this state. It brings farmers enough cash so they can spare a few bucks for the volunteer fire department or the PTA bake sale. It lets kids stay on the family farm, knowing they’ll have the income to cover their bills. Thanks to tobacco, Kentucky remains a state of small, know-your-neighbor communities. Rural residents don’t have to migrate to urban centers for jobs. Not as long as they can plant a few acres of tobacco. As a result, nearly 80% of Kentucky cities have populations under 5,000. And nearly everyone appreciates the power of tobacco.

“I’ve been out in California and mentioned I grow tobacco, and people look at you like they want to kill you,” said Susan G. Harkins, a central Kentucky farmer who also grows organic vegetables and herbs. “But we’re not bad people. This is just how this culture has been for generations and generations.”

It’s easy to see why.

A federal price support system in place since 1941 restricts the amount of tobacco on the market by assigning each farmer an annual quota. The system keeps prices so predictably plump that growers have little incentive to test out other crops. Profit estimates vary, but farmers generally say they can make from $1,200 to $4,000 an acre off tobacco, guaranteed.

The result: what grower Joe Gragg terms “tobacco syndrome.” Tobacco, he says with a grin, “sort of disables [farmers’] brains to the point where they can’t think about anything else.”

A burly, talk-your-ear-off type with a folksy patter, Gragg directs a co-op of four dozen eastern Kentucky farmers who are trying to market vegetables as an alternative to tobacco. But for all he preaches about the merits of cabbage and watermelon, Gragg is still afflicted with tobacco syndrome. He raises a few acres of the “golden weed” even now--as a security blanket, an assurance he’ll make some money even if the tomato market sours and his bok choy crop rots. And he knows he’s not alone.

“When you have a bowl full of gravy in front of you,” he explained, “it’s hard to get people to look at a bowl of veggies.”

Part of the resistance to diversification stems from the conviction, repeated like a mantra, that tobacco is uniquely suited to Kentucky’s terrain.

The western half of the state is fairly flexible; thoroughbred horses and beef cattle do fine grazing in the rolling bluegrass hills. In the east, however, those hills become mountains, rising sharp and flinty at odd, jutting angles. A 100-acre farm out here might have just three or four acres of arable land--and that atop a rocky ridge. Tobacco takes to this kind of farming wonderfully. Finding other ways to make money off such stingy land, however, requires considerable ingenuity.

Worries About Financial Future

Hoffman, for instance, has been breeding goats for 27 years and is now encouraging others to take it up too. But he’s the first to concede that, at $100 a head when the market’s up, goats won’t cover a mortgage payment.

A wiry, energetic man who built his log cabin by hand, Hoffman has tried boosting his income by raising everything from shiitake mushrooms to miniature pickles. He peddles his produce constantly, to farmer’s markets, grocery stores and even prisons. Still, it’s the 3,800 pounds of tobacco he grows each year that enables him to live where he loves to live, in the remote, rutted reaches of this town that is itself a far reach from everywhere in the foothills of Appalachia.

“Without tobacco,” he said, “I’m not going to be able to farm.”

Of course, no one has suggested that tobacco will vanish altogether.

But sagging demand prompted the government to cut quotas by 30% last month, meaning that a farmer who used to count on $10,000 a year in tobacco income can now plant just $7,000 worth. Philip Morris just announced it will close its Louisville cigarette plant next year, eliminating 1,400 jobs. And most folks in tobacco country expect those are just the first of many blows to come.

Under heavy pressure from governors of a dozen tobacco-producing states, cigarette companies have set up a $5.15-billion trust fund to help farmers adjust to leaner times. In addition, President Clinton has demanded that farmers and tobacco-dependent communities get at least some of the $206-billion settlement that the state attorneys general wrested from cigarette companies to pay for the public health costs of smoking.

So there’s plenty of money available to wean Kentucky from tobacco. The question is how to spend it--and whether money, even billions, can change a culture.

To prod diversification, the main tobacco growers’ cooperative in Kentucky offers grants to farmers trying new directions, from raising trout to staging pick-your-own-pumpkin festivals. Health groups are pitching in as well. The anti-smoking organization Kentucky Action, for instance, gave a high school in impoverished Owsley County $9,000 to set up a garden where kids learn, in the words of one student, that “there’s more to farms than tobacco.”

By putting “a serious amount of money on the table,” these initiatives “have given us a chance to, if not save every rural community, at least make a good effort at preserving the rural way of life,” said Ferrel Guillory, a North Carolina scholar who has studied the tobacco economy.

Reinventing tobacco row, however, “is rocket science,” Guillory warned. “It’s very, very hard.” And it will require a boldness that Kentucky may not be able to muster.

“[We have] never been a state that thinks like Silicon Valley. We’re more risk averse,” said Sylvia Lovely, executive director of the Kentucky League of Cities. “Out here in the heartland, this is not an entrepreneurial culture.”

Growing tobacco suits that cautious Midwest nature because it’s virtually risk-free. The plant is so hardy that farmers can pull in decent crops even in disastrous weather. Even poor-quality tobacco fetches good money, thanks to the price support system. And there’s no marketing involved: Farmers just drop their bales at the local warehouse and pick up their checks.

In comparison, other crops seem a fool’s errand.

True, University of Kentucky economists have estimated that cantaloupe and winter squash can bring in considerably more profit per acre than tobacco, after costs are factored in. Eggplant, cauliflower and cabbage offer returns comparable to tobacco.

Yet all these crops are chancy. An unexpected freeze or pelting rain could wipe out a year’s worth of profits. And only the very best-looking produce sells. Tobacco farmers are used to getting paid, and paid well, for every scrap of crinkly leaf they harvest. When they turn to selling peppers, they may have to toss out half their crop as too mushy or wrinkly for consumers.

Farmers complain as well that it’s tough to get loans or insurance for crops other than tobacco. Advice also is hard to come by.

If your tobacco plants look sickly, chances are your neighbor or your dad or your uncle knows why. If you’re really stumped, the University of Kentucky can send out a researcher who has studied tobacco for years. Grow squash, however, and you’re pretty much on your own.

John Bell, 29, found the isolation frustrating when, fresh from college lectures on the need to diversify, he began to raise vegetables in addition to the tobacco his family has grown for four generations. “There were a whole lot of questions and a whole lot of guesses,” Bell recalled, spitting tobacco juice into the dirt, “but no answers.”

Despite these obstacles, Kevin Evans, a ruddy 45-year-old farmer in central Kentucky, is giving tobacco-free life a go.

A tobacco farmer for 27 years, Evans once won a Philip Morris leadership award as one of Kentucky’s top producers. In recent years, however, he watched several relatives struggle with lung cancer. And he heard rumblings that demand for tobacco would soften.

So, for reasons both moral and economic, Evans began growing peppers, eggplant, broccoli, squash and apples. It’s worked out so well that this spring he plans to “burn his bridges” and, for the first time, not plant a single tobacco plant. That prospect has left him gnawingly anxious. “It’s scary,” he said.

Still, Evans feels confident he’s made the right decision.

In the end, he agrees with the Louisville Courier-Journal, which pronounced in a recent editorial: “There can be no more of the old saws that have led Kentucky leaders in the past to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Nothing can replace tobacco.’ Something must.”