Tobacco’s Golden Days

In the sliver of time that lines the far edge of summer, burley tobacco is tinged with a thin, spreading ring of gold. Baking for months under the summer sun, it gives off a surprisingly gamey aroma, reminiscent of natural fertilizer or unwashed mushrooms.

In just a few weeks, an entire eight-acre field, cradled in a valley in the heart of Haywood County, N.C., will turn brilliant gold with the broad leaves of tobacco ready for harvest. 

In part, the color is what gives the plant gets its nickname, the golden leaf. However, the moniker also refers to its pride of place in the Appalachian economy for the last century or more. As one of the only cash crops sustainable in the rocky and steep mountains, tobacco was nigh upon invaluable to the region. 

Don Smart tells how, as a child, he would wait up sleeplessly deep into the night on two nights out of every year: the day the tobacco was weighed and the day it was sold. 

“I knew if the tobacco sold good, it would be a good Christmas,” says Smart, a fifth-generation Haywood County farmer. He has farmed tobacco all his life, still has 40 acres of it dotted around the region, and in the Smokies, he is a dying breed of mountain man. 

“There might be about 10 burley growers still in Haywood County,” he says. “At one time, there were about 700.”

Smart’s 40 acres aren’t destined for a long life as tobacco fields if he can’t find someone to take the helm of his business when he retires. Smart is 59 and has no children, just a niece and two nephews who are still in grade school. 

“I’m 59 years old now and there’s nobody coming up behind me,” says Smart. “And they’re fools if they do.”

The precipitous drop can be easily traced to 2004 and what growers colloquially call ‘the buyout.’ 

The buyout was the moment the government got out of the tobacco business. 

Officially, it was called the very governmental Tobacco Transition Payment Program. 

The tobacco program itself was the lone holdout of FDR’s Depression-era stimulus ideas. Essentially, it kept both the supply and demand sides of tobacco in its hands. Quotas were attached to land where tobacco was grown, and farmers agreed to stick to the quotas in return for price stability from the feds. 

In 2004, the government bought up all the quotas — $7 per pound if you owned the quota, $3 per pound if you were renting it from another farmer, which was common. 

And the multitude of small farmers that once grew burley up and down the mountains saw a golden opportunity to get away from the golden leaf. 

“Everybody else, I guess, dropped off because they didn’t like fooling with it,” says Smart, laughing loudly as he strolls in dirt-caked boots through the sandy soil of his hillside field, snapping unwanted leaves from six-foot stalks. “It’s the one thing I know how to do.”

His point is relevant, too, to why most of the burley is grown by large farms today. It’s an intensely labor heavy crop. Nothing is machine harvested; the plants must be topped, cut, dried, and cured by human hands. 

Other crops like corn and soybeans may not bring as much money, but they don’t require as much on the front end, either. 

There are two problems with the large-farm trend, though, and the most pressing and potentially costly is quality, followed by regulation.

“Even the companies will admit that the highest quality is coming from small farms,” says Roger Quarles, president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative. He represents farmers in five states—pretty much all the burley out there—so he’s well acquainted with the nuances of the business. “The larger farms, they’re all trapped into using high-priced labor, and the smaller farms typically don’t have to do that,” Quarles said. “The larger farms have to start very early and work very late in the season, then their harvest is anywhere from July to November, and none of that is good for quality or yield.”

Even a cursory mention of burley tobacco to anyone involved in the business will reveal the fact that product grown in these mountains is actually the best in the world. They get the highest prices and 80 percent of it goes overseas, mostly to Asia, so big farmers who are missing out on the quality and burdened with high overhead are losing out, around 30 cents a pound on average. 

And then there are the Good Agriculture Practices, which are already being implemented for consumable things like vegetables. Tobacco farmers aren’t yet under the thumb of legally required GAP rules, but most think that the day is coming. GAP is a popular subject among growers. But it is not at all a popular idea. It is quite close to what it sounds like, a manual for how a crop must be grown, from plant to harvest and beyond. Scott Bissette, who works in tobacco for the N.C. Department of Agriculture, wrote a set of GAP guidelines for flue-cured tobacco growers. Flue-cured tobacco is half of what goes into a cigarette, imparting its distinctive flavor. Most of North Carolina grows that variety because it’s not bothered by the heat that characterizes summers down east. Burley, which is far more bitter and gives the cigarette its signature burn, is much more sun-shy. 

The N.C. Department of Agriculture’s role in the business is severely diminished in the post-buyout world, but he still does things like this, offering guidance and future support to the growers who are still out there. 

“What it’s really doing is documenting what you’re already doing,” says Bissette, and that’s the problem most farmers have with it. Yes, one may use the correct chemicals in safe amounts. Yes, one may use sustainable soil practices. But that doesn’t mean one has time to write all that down. That’s Don Smart’s gripe with the idea—GAP rules wouldn’t change his farming, they would change his record keeping. 

There’s a song made famous by the one-time country darlings the Dixie Chicks about a former burley family. The story opens with a vacant field and siblings who have found work elsewhere as the farm languishes and the singer tries his luck in Nashville. It’s a common and overwrought theme in Southern country, reminiscence for the heyday of the farm. The song ends on what would seem to be an unrealistically hopeful note—the singer sees the emptiness of showbusiness and returns to his roots in the land. 

 “We’re probably down to about 65 to 70 percent across the whole belt of what we were just before the buyout,” says Paul Denton, a burley tobacco specialist with the University of Tennessee and University of Kentucky. “We think in Tennessee we may have lost more than 80 percent of our producers.”

Small producers, though, could have an opening to get back into the game, and back in profitably. Those two factors that are hurting large farms—quality and regulation—aren’t a problem for small farms. Little outfits were exempted from GAP rules on vegetables, as it would’ve been far too onerous for them to stay afloat. Most believe that, when the rules eventually come down, the little guys will escape the hammer in tobacco, too. Then there’s the quality. Small farms, we’ve learned, make better quality product and their overhead is lower. In the triad of states that have long been the only place to produce burley—Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee—no one is really taking advantage of that fact, and for decades, no one has ever been able to find a place like the southern Applachians that will grow that crop like we do. The soil, the climate, the particular crispness of the fall, it’s a perfect storm for perfect tobacco. 

“If you look worldwide I’m sure there are [other places], but nobody’s been able to find them,” says Denton. “The possible exception is Pennsylvania.”

Which is now the third-largest burley-growing state in the nation. The small farms concept has caught on there with a truly unlikely demographic. 

That’s right. The Amish are now producing cigarette tobacco, along with their ideological neighbors, the Mennonites. 

In a surprise move, the Amish have become the new mountain men of tobacco, and it’s working for them because they’ve embraced small production that can be done by their families. It also helps that they’ve got large families full of free labor who are motivated by commitment to God. 

“It is a little bit self limiting, because basically they’re going to go up to what the family can handle,” says Denton. “But they’ve jumped on the burley tobacco opportunity pretty heavily.”

While farmers back in the traditional growing regions may not have a bevy of hard-working offspring at hand, the model is at least workable as long as seasonal labor is around. 

For mid-size growers like Smart, the prospects are a little dimmer, because the larger you get, the harder it is to find seasonal help and maintain such a labor-intensive crop. 

“Farmers that are going to survive are going to be the small ones,” says Smart. He’s looking into the sun that’s priming his tobacco for harvest, while right next to it is a field of corn he’s using to diversify his income from what was once his best cash crop. “Mid-size farmers like us, our days are numbered,” Smart said. 

Tobacco farming in the mountains will never be what it once was, the main moneymaker for many a mountain farmer, but it could start making its way back into the aresenals of small growers, just one of many crops that rotate in and out of his soil. 

“I definitely think diversified is better,” says Bissette. “Nowadays, it’s very competitive and if you’re not a top-notch producer, your contract can be cut or eliminated.”

The free market approach means anyone can get into tobacco, but it also means that not everyone will succeed as they did before. 

“There’s very few dedicated tobacco growers,” says Quarles. “Very few, anywhere, particularly burley.”

Having a tomato or soybean or corn crop to fall back on is just wise in this new economy, but having an acre or two of tobacco might be, too. 

“Tobacco is a profitable crop. Farmers can, even on relatively smaller acreages, make a living,” says Bissette. “An acre of tobacco grosses about $5,000 and an acre of corn grosses $400, so do the math. You can make a living on smaller acreage with tobacco.”

Even as a mid-range farmer, Smart has diversified in more than a few ways. He has a dairy, the corn crop, some soybeans as well as cucumbers and tomatoes. 

No one, not the growers or the experts, believe that tobacco as a crop is going away anytime soon. People still smoke, at home and abroad, and no government initiative is going to regulate that away. 

Tobacco as king of the mountains is gone, and the mountain tobacco man with it. But tobacco as money-making crop is still making its leafy, golden way. And the part-time tobacco man? Well, he might just be making a comeback.