Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 18, 1994 TAG: 9407220069
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RICHARD CARTWRIGHT AUSTIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
These are considerate people. I noticed only two men who lit cigarettes from the time our congressman called us to order at 10 a.m. until we broke for the lunch that the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of the cigarette companies, provided at noon. I'm sure that many men and women present had put the requirements of health, and duty to family, ahead of their pleasure and, like myself, quit smoking some years ago. The others waited courteously for the lunch break to step outside.
Congressman Boucher gave a masterful report on his legislative strategies to curb tobacco imports, to discourage the Food and Drug Administration from regulating tobacco as a drug, and to reduce the excise tax on tobacco that is proposed to help pay for health-care reform. Nevertheless, the news was almost entirely grim.
William Myers manages the Burley Stabilization Corp. in Knoxville, which buys Virginia tobacco to support the price. He reported on the huge inventories of unsold burley piling up in warehouses and warned that next year's tobacco allotments might be reduced by as much as 40 percent. Alternatively, the price might have to drop that much.
``Which would you prefer?'' he asked the assembled farmers - but he didn't pause for a reply since either alternative is grim for farmers. The future for American tobacco, he suggested, lies in foreign sales. American burley, now supported at more than $1.70 a pound, would have to compete on the world market with foreign burley selling for 50 cents. Myers didn't complete the arithmetic, but attentive listeners registered his conclusion. Deep price cuts lie ahead.
When prices for American tobacco fall below $1 a pound, the small famers who now produce the majority of burley will be forced out of production. Only huge mechanized operations will survive.
Charles Whitley, speaking for the Tobacco Institute, ended his pep talk with a wistful meditation about how the North Carolina region where he lives once depended upon turpentine production, then upon cotton, then upon flue-cured tobacco. ``I guess we will always find another crop,'' he suggested. When the Tobacco Institute grows wistful, farmers had better read the signs of the times.
Only Clarence ``Bud'' Phillips, from the Virginia House of Delegates, spoke with foresight. After noting that the Russell County farmers whom he represents do not want to discuss alternatives to tobacco, he suggested that, nevertheless, we may need to prepare alternatives for the time when change is forced upon us.
Most farmers in that room will not consider alternatives. They have raised tobacco all their lives, and they will persevere in the hope of reaching retirement before shrinking allotments and falling prices force them to abandon the crop they know.
But a young farmer down the road from me, an enthusiastic tobacco-grower in years past, has this year switched most of his effort to tomatoes - a perishable crop which has no marketing support or price protection. It's a big risk, but he has seen the handwriting on the wall. ``I'll always raise a little tobacco,'' he told me, because like most farmers hereabouts he loves the culture of tobacco farming that has predominated for 60 years. He didn't join the older farmers at the meeting, however. He had made another choice.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I met with a much smaller group of farmers where I felt more like a father or even a grandfather. These young men and women are growing specialty vegetables and fruits, using methods as near to organic as possible, and raising grass-fed beef, grass-fed pork and range chickens. This spring, they formed a marketing cooperative to deliver to restaurants in the area, and business is brisk.
The old farm where we met looked new again: a feeding shed under construction, experimental planting beds, equipment lying about waiting for a home. This farmer had moved to the Abingdon area from California. Others in the group were native to the mountains.
The question, I realized, is not whether the farmers who met with Congressman Boucher can be persuaded to convert from tobacco to other crops. The question is whether we can raise a new generation of small farmers to occupy the lovely homesteads throughout Southwest Virginia, to attend our churches, to patronize our stores, to send their children to our schools, to play their guitar or fiddle on Saturday nights.
If the wonderful rural life of this region is to continue, then we need young farmers. They, to survive, must learn to raise new crops and find markets for them.
There's a proposal circulating in the U.S. Congress to allocate a portion of the proposed excise tax on tobacco to fund research and marketing assistance for those who want to raise new crops in the traditional tobacco region. I helped to draft the plan, but most older tobacco farmers don't want to talk about it.
Yet we can see the vultures circling above our small-farm culture. Just the other day, I got a letter from a land company in Alabama, interested in buying my farm and my neighbor's. If, on retirement, we sell to out-of-state land companies that consolidate farms to run cattle and cut trees, the homesteads will decay, our churches will close, and the rural community will die. The alternative is to support help for our children and grandchildren who want to farm in new ways, and for those who move to mountain farms because they want to be our neighbors.
Richard Cartwright Austin farms in Scott County and teaches environmental theology with Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center.
by CNB