Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407180117
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIENNE PETTY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PENHOOK LENGTH: Long
"The tobacco industry's been on shaky ground before and pulled through, and I believe that it'll pull through again," he said.
Connell McEnhimer, another local farmer, also believes tobacco farming is here to stay. He's expanding.
A few miles down the road, though, Landis Walker is thinking about shutting down his tobacco farm.
Walker is nearing retirement age and, he says, "the future of tobacco don't look too rosy."
As suppliers of perhaps the most vilified legal cash crop in the United States, tobacco farmers in Franklin County and elsewhere are on the ground level of an industry whiplashed by political and economic forces that pose the biggest threat ever to their livelihood.
A little more than 100 producers grow tobacco in Franklin County, the remnant of the 500 farmers who grew it across the county in 1978. Faced with labor problems and a diminishing profit margin, smaller growers have sold their plots to larger producers.
"There's no tobacco west of [U.S.] 220 and very little north of [Virginia] 40," said Roger Seale, director of the county's Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service office. The agency administers farmers' quotas and allotments, which control prices by limiting the amount of acres farmers can grow and the pounds they can sell based on how much tobacco companies request.
The number of allotments in the county has decreased by 86 percent since Seale came to ASCS in 1978, partly because of the decreased demand for cigarettes. Tobacco acreage now is less than 50 percent of what the county had 20 years ago.
In Washington, the long-building anti-smoking movement is nearing a high point.
The Big Six cigarette companies are under blistering attack, with the Food and Drug Administration probing whether the manufacturers are boosting nicotine levels in cigarettes to hook smokers. The FDA is trying to establish grounds for regulating nicotine as a drug. The public tide continues to turn against tobacco, with smoking outlawed in some restaurants, malls and offices.
Earning a living is becoming an even greater challenge for tobacco growers. The world market is flooded with tobacco, especially cheap crops produced by foreign competitors.
Even worse, from the growers' perspective, the Clinton administration has proposed a 75-cent-per-pack tax increase on cigarettes to help finance national health-care reform. Farmers worry that it will dampen demand for cigarettes even more.
Facing these hardships, some Franklin County tobacco growers are paralyzed by uncertainty. Others expect the challenges to fade and are expanding. Still others aren't worried at all, having grown wealthy from tobacco farming.
Despite the different reactions, though, the farmers are bound together in their desire to hang on to a lifestyle that defines who they are.
Small seeds, lots of faith
At 4 a.m. bedroom lights go on in Penhook, a tobacco farming community bordered by Virginia 40 on the north and Turkeycock Mountain on the south.
By dawn, the farmers are riding their snarling tractors back and forth across copper brown soil.
In the summer, the heat exhausts them. The air feels like hot, damp velvet.
"A lot of days in July and August, we will move pipes all day long," said Johnny Angell, a farmer south of Penhook, describing installation of the irrigation system. "You can imagine how hot, how sweaty, how humid, how muddy, that job can be."
As fall approaches, they scurry to complete their last "pullings" to save the harvest from the devastating, frosty October nights that lie ahead.
They often suffer the contrariness of nature.
"One of the most humbling things I have ever experienced is watching a beautiful crop of tobacco being destroyed in 10 minutes by a hailstorm," Angell said.
Emma Jean Jefferson speaks about what pulls them through.
"A farmer is closer to God," she said. "He has to have more faith in that little seed and that little plant than most people realize. You have to have faith. If you don't, there's no use in planting anything."
'The Lord will provide'
Two years ago, Steve Jefferson abandoned a salaried job at Advance Auto Parts to return to tobacco farming when his father died. At 31, he is one of Franklin County's youngest tobacco farmers. He has a young family to help raise as well - a wife, a 3-month-old son and a 1-year-old daughter.
For him, the current pressures on the tobacco industry are magnified.
"I've got two children now, both of them are in diapers, and it makes me concerned about how I would ever support them," he said.
The stigma attached to tobacco farming adds to his anxiety.
When his second child was born at a Roanoke hospital, doctors chided him for producing tobacco. He joked that he only encounters anti-smoking sentiment when he's north of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"It used to be a commodity I was proud of and wasn't ashamed to tell everybody I grow," Jefferson said. "I'm still proud of it. I'm just careful who I tell."
Even so, farm life holds a powerful appeal.
"I felt like I could teach my kids more out on the farm than I could working in town," he said. "They'll know at an early age what work is and where your dollars come from."
Emma Jean Jefferson, his mother, doesn't worry much about her son's future.
"The Lord will provide for him some way," she said.
She hopes it all works out not only for her son, but for others who depend on the family farm for their livelihood.
She's grown to love the two brothers from Mexico who work as farmhands. They are affected by the assault on tobacco as much as American farmers are. The threat to tobacco could put them out of work.
Emma Jean is one of the few women who runs a tobacco farm. She claims that Steve is the boss and she's just another field hand. But everyone knows that she oversees everything that happens on the farm.
The marks of her trade are wrinkles stamped into her tawny skin. She was born on a tobacco farm, raised the crop with her husband for 39 years until he died, and she plans to continue.
She feels no moral dilemma over growing a crop many say is deadly.
Her only shame would come from not doing it well.
"I think they ought to lay off the tobacco farmer. They ought to lay off all the farmers; they feed the nation. I think they're looked down on. I think they should be looked up to, and I'm looking forward to that day."
Bound and determined
Connell McEnhimer, who farms with his father, Russell, shrugs off any suggestion that tobacco farming is endangered.
Already this year, they have invested $16,000 in a new greenhouse and spent more to purchase additional curing barns. They employ 12 Mexican farmhands.
"I'm not worried," Connell McEnhimer said. "Why should I be? Nothing has happened; it's just a few people fussing."
With a 125-acre tobacco quota in hand, the McEnhimers, among the county's largest producers, can afford to be confident.
Still, though they doubt the government will ever ban tobacco, a crop that grosses $5 million in Franklin County alone, the two McEnhimers traveled to Washington in March for a rally against the proposed cigarette tax.
"A little insurance never hurts," Connell said.
"Let's support 'em, don't tax 'em," said the dark caps emblazoned with a bright golden leaf emblem that both father and son wore in their hothouse one day recently. .
Russell McEnhimer, 64, doesn't see any alternative to raising tobacco, which he's done since 1950, first as a sharecropper and later on his own land.
"If they ban tobacco, our next bet is welfare," he said.
Many have suggested that tobacco farmers can easily switch to growing vegetables. Russell McEnhimer disagrees.
Few crops offer viable alternatives to tobacco, he said.
Seale, the ASCS office director, agreed with him as they talked about tobacco's future on a recent, unusually cool afternoon.
"A lot of vegetables will do better than tobacco," Seale said. "But if you find a worm in one head of broccoli, they reject the whole crop."
While farmers can store tobacco for more than a year, vegetables are perishable.
Only one Franklin County farmer has switched, growing strawberries and sweet potatoes, and renting his tobacco allotment to another farmer.
"If every tobacco farmer went to vegetables, we'd have no way of processing it," Seale said.
A generation gap
Robert and Susie Young are phasing out their tobacco production in Sontag.
They are getting up in years, but the prospect of a tax increase is what pushed them to the decision.
They won't pass the family heritage on to their five children, all of whom have moved away and started their own families.
Tobacco money sent all five to college.
"I wouldn't encourage them [to farm] because it's impossible to buy a farm and make a living now," Robert Young said.
Besides, none of his children was interested in staying on the farm.
"They wanted to educate themselves and find easier work with faster money," Susie Young said.
Over the July Fourth weekend, his far-flung clan surprised him by coming home for his 70th birthday.
Such reunions are rare now. But growing up, the family members were seldom apart.
Olinda, their 40-year-old daughter, now lives in Phoenix, Ariz. She reminisced about her childhood on the farm as she and the rest of the family prepared for the party.
"The way we grew up, we were together all the time, working for the common good," she said.
Olinda, her sister and two brothers all tended to chores on the farm, which has anchored the family for more than 40 years.
Still, they had the freedom to discover themselves.
"As much as there was a need to be dependent on each other to produce, there was also an independence, too," she said, adding, "I was free to take off and explore."
Her independence is reflected, in part, in her views on the smoking controversy - a position at odds with that of her parents.
Robert and Susie Young wish that anti-smoking advocates would focus more on fighting illegal drug use.
But Olinda - who, like three of her siblings, used to smoke - is decidedly in favor of anti-smoking efforts.
She and her husband, a doctor, don't want their three children to pick up the habit.
"It's difficult for me to teach my kids to have an appreciation of what grandpa has done," she said. "I try to divert their attention from that because they know that [smoking] is not good for you."
Even so, she's trying to pass along to her kids some of the values derived from farm life.
Back home in Phoenix, they raise sheep and chickens, and her kids pitch in.
She wants her children to understand that nothing is promised. She said her parents cultivated many crops other than tobacco so that they would always have something to fall back on, and she's sure they would have adapted well to the chilling effect of a higher tobacco tax if they'd had to.
"I know my daddy is very resourceful. If it had happened 20 years ago, he would have found a way."
A fat tax?
Johnny Angell is more anxious than he's ever been about the tobacco industry's future.
In the past 15 years, he and his wife, Sharon, and her brother, Posey France, invested $450,000 growing 47 acres of tobacco.
They have a modest lifestyle and no health insurance.
Now, they want to spend $30,000 on a greenhouse, which is more efficient than using plant beds, but "there's a cloud hanging over the future of tobacco and I'd like to see the future a little clearer before I make any investments," he said.
The tax infuriates him most.
A paunchy, bearded man, he speaks rapidly and loudly, and even amusingly, about the threat he sees in the Clinton administration's cigarette tax proposal.
Sure, he acknowledges, cigarettes are unhealthy, but so are many other indulgences.
Just as tobacco companies don't force people to smoke, "didn't nobody make me fat but me and my wife's good cooking," he said.
His point: Why not a "fat" tax on food?
"I've laid in bed thinking about that Little Debbie oatmeal cookie," he joked.
Angell, who grew up in the northern part of the county, started late in the tobacco business when he married and moved to his wife's family tobacco farm. She fondly recalls having roasted corn and chicken on coals used for the fires in curing tobacco in her father's barn.
"I didn't see a stalk of tobacco until I was 18 years old," Johnny Angell said. "I always knew you could smoke tobacco and chew tobacco, but I didn't know you had to work it."
Today, Angell is something of a tobacco historian. He vividly describes how the curing has changed over the years.
Starting more than 200 years ago, tobacco was cured in old-style curing barns, many built by slaves.
Some of those barns are now on farms owned by descendants of former slaves.
Stacks of tobacco leaves tied together into "hands" were cured by 180-degree air that passed through flues. By day, farmers lugged tobacco to the barns on the backs of mules. At night, farmers rested on straw mattresses, manning the wood fire to keep the heat even.
They collected the wood during the winter, when up to 30 farmers spent a week cutting 8-foot-long logs with double-bitted axes, and piling them in a teepee form.
Now, farmers cure tobacco in trailers and regulate the heat with thermostats.
With all the threats to the business, Angell is preparing himself mentally in case he has to leave it all behind. He also betrays a note of bitterness, vowing to sue if the tobacco industry doesn't survive the proposed tax and the federal government doesn't reimburse his investment.
"They did not tell me 15 years ago when I bought my tobacco quota that they were going to tax it out of existence," he said.
Recalling glory days
About 15 years ago, Landis Walker raised up to 40 acres of tobacco on his fifth-generation farm, where his family has amassed 550 acres.
Now, he's seriously considering renting his 20-acre allotment to other farmers.
What Walker used to invest in tobacco production, he's now investing in the spacious ranch-style brick house where he and his wife live. They've just finished their basement, and they're now renovating the kitchen - all with tobacco money.
Walker's disillusionment with tobacco started five years ago. He's grown weary from decreasing allotments and mounting paperwork required under pesticide and chemical regulations.
The proposed tobacco tax only adds to his frustration.
The rally in Washington helped, he said, but he feels powerless to effect more change.
He remembers the glory days, when nicotine was so important to the war effort that tobacco farmers got deferments during World War II.
"I didn't smoke, but those cigarettes really kept them going," said the 66-year-old Korean War veteran. "I don't know if it was good or bad, but we won the war."
He started farming upon returning from war. He didn't want to punch anyone's clock; he wanted freedom.
"That's what we fought for is freedom; farming gives you some freedom," he said. "But things are getting to the point where you don't enjoy the freedom much anymore."
Slowly, contemplatively, he speaks of feeling betrayed.
Walker said he would be deceiving himself if he didn't prepare for the demise of tobacco, and he urges his fellow farmers to follow suit.
"Most of the people have not thought about it," he said. "They're just taking it as it comes. One day, they're going to wake up and it's already come."
by CNB