Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004080278
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RONALD SMOTHERS THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: HALIFAX - LENGTH: Long
But he noted that the melons and vegetables didn't amount to much next to the profits from his main crop, tobacco.
"If society succeeds in putting tobacco out of business we'll still have something," said the 50-year-old farmer. "Not much, but something."
There was a time when the disapproval of tobacco seemed to come from "a few loonies and health nuts," said J.M. Jenkins Jr., the chairman of Tobacco Associates, a growers' group.
Farmers were content to allow the powerful cigarette manufacturers to shoulder much of the burden of lobbying and public relations.
Even attacks like the recent one on cigarette marketing plans by Louis W. Sullivan, the secretary of health and human services, were still a distant thunder.
But lately the unthinkable has been happening in the tobacco-growing country of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Florida.
Last month the Virginia General Assembly passed a law restricting smoking in public places.
The City Council in Greensboro, N.C., in the heart of a state that produces two-thirds of the nation's flue-cured tobacco leaf, enacted similar restrictions earlier this year.
Neighboring Raleigh this spring passed an ordinance requiring restaurants to post signs indicating whether they had a no-smoking section.
And last fall nearby Durham, which was built largely with tobacco money, gave its City of Medicine Award to Dr. C. Everett Koop, the former U.S. surgeon general who once proclaimed a goal of a smoke-free America by the year 2000.
"It makes people look at us as if we are doing something wrong," said Charles Harvey, president of the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina. "It's insulting and I'm tired of us getting put down when we are doing honest work growing a legal crop."
What perhaps rankles the most, said Jerome Vick, a tobacco farmer from Wilson, N.C., are comparisons between tobacco growers in the United States and the Latin American growers of coca that supply the drug trade here.
"They say we export death, and I consider statements like that an attack on my future and the future of my family," Vick said. "I grow a legal commodity and I don't encourage or advocate smoking, but they make me sound like a criminal."
While tobacco growers' pride may be hurt, their profits are not, even though the number of acres of tobacco has declined by almost 30 percent in the last 10 years, from about 555,000 acres nationwide in 1980 to about 396,000 acres in 1989.
Tobacco remains the largest cash crop in North Carolina and Virginia, accounting for about 20 percent of North Carolina's annual income from agriculture and 24 percent of Virginia's.
Nationwide tobacco sales by farmers last year were estimated at $1.5 billion.
And farmers say that only the continued high profitability of tobacco allows them to consider the investment and the risk involved in diversifying, a course advocated by anti-smoking groups.
James Devine, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, said gross revenue for farmers in the state amounted to $241 an acre for corn, $175 an acre for soybeans and $728 an acre for peanuts. Gross revenue from an acre of tobacco amounted to $3,478.
"Harvesting tobacco is labor-intensive, but even with those costs it is light years ahead of anything else," Devine said. "And it is those profits which allow farmers to do other things which make North Carolina first in turkey production, seventh in hog production and first in sweet potato production."
The Southeast's flue-cured tobacco, known as bright leaf because of its golden color after heat curing, is the largest component of American tobacco production, 62 percent of the 1989 crop of 838 million pounds.
The next largest type is the air-cured darker burley tobacco, grown primarily in the cooler climates of Kentucky and Tennessee.
The importance of the tobacco crop to Conner and his family, none of whom smokes, becomes even clearer when one looks at Conner's farm.
Only about 75 acres out of 4,000 are devoted to tobacco, but that land produces 90 percent of his farm's income.
When he entered agricultural school at North Carolina State University, Conner said his teachers encouraged him to "get into more gentlemanly pursuits" and away from the "stoop labor" of tobacco farming.
The time was the late 1950s, when tobacco was coming under attack as a health hazard and when more and more of the rural labor force was opting for higher-paying jobs in industry or in urban areas.
By the late '70s tobacco was under siege from foreign competition, increased tobacco taxes and a growing health consciousness. Despite this, it remained a better prospect than any other crop, and beginning in 1982 Conner increased his tobacco acreage.
"The farming got to be a big gamble, and that does something to your hair," said Conner.
He said he discouraged his sons, who were in college, from coming home to the farm after graduation and in 1988 took a job in town "just to maintain what I had."
Conner's attempts to keep going with crops other than tobacco is a story repeated on farm after farm in the 1980s, as tobacco acreage dropped.
In the last two years tobacco production has picked up slightly, said Fred Bond, general manager of the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corp., a grower-supported group that helps administer a federal quota program for growers and purchases tobacco not sold at auction.
"The growers are making money now and using the tobacco profits to pay the bills associated with other crops they are growing," Bond said.
"It's allowed a lot of them to stay in farming, but with new threats of increased taxes, continued declines in consumption and the new assaults by anti-smoking forces, it will take at least two more years to make a judgment about the future," he said.
In the end, the federal government, not farmers, decides how much tobacco is grown in this country each year.
So farmers do what they can to hedge their bets, diversifying their crops or taking salaried jobs in town and farming in the evening as what they call "sundowners."
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