THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 13, 1994 TAG: 9408130294
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ZEBULON LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
When it comes to bringing home the bacon, hogs are doing it better than tobacco in North Carolina.
Porky Pig and his brethren are expected to become the No. 1 cash commodity here in the nation's top tobacco-growing state, where the golden leaf has reigned supreme since dethroning ``King Cotton'' in 1919.
More and more small farmers like Gary Creech, who make their living from the land, are using more of it to raise hogs and less to grow tobacco.
``You know what's going on in the tobacco industry,'' he says. ``It's kind of a shaky time to have all your eggs in one basket.''
Tobacco has been under continuous attack, with the latest blow coming earlier this month when an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration said nicotine is addictive - a step toward its regulation as a drug.
Creech, who grew 150 acres of tobacco last year, cut back to 90 acres this year. He and his brothers have a 600-sow operation and are building another one more than twice that size.
What Creech is doing in Zebulon, a rural community near Raleigh, is going on all over the state, says Bob Murphy, chief statistician for the state Agriculture Department.
In 1993 as in previous years, tobacco generated about $1 billion, about 18 percent of total cash receipts of $5.5 billion. Hogs kicked in almost $922 million last year, and is expected to increase that by about a third this year.
Meanwhile, there was a 10 percent decrease in tobacco allotments in 1994, says Murphy, who is quick to defend tobacco's honor.
``There's nothing to take away from tobacco just because hogs may increase,'' he says. ``Tobacco has a greater economic impact on more people than the hog industry does.''
While there are about 8,000 hog farmers in the state, there are 15,000 tobacco farmers, he said. In addition, there are the jobs created by cigarette manufacturing, he said.
``It would be nice to be No. 1 in everything, but as long as we keep a strong economic impact, we're happy,'' said Lisa Eddington, spokeswoman for the Raleigh-based Tobacco Growers Information Committee, which represents more than 150,000 farmers in 23 states.
``It just goes to show that people are responding to the criticism of needing to diversify,'' she says. ``There they are, diversifying into hog farming.''
Hogs are one of the more popular alternatives for tobacco farmers, says Kelly Zering, associate professor in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University.
``I have hearsay evidence that when they announced the cutbacks in tobacco quota poundage this year, most of the people in hog production had calls from farmers looking for an alternative enterprise,'' he says.
``As I travel around the state, I run into people who are tobacco farmers and asking about hog enterprises as an investment and use of their labor and land.''
Tobacco farms tend to be small; the average farm size in North Carolina is 159 acres, too small to make a living growing corn, soybeans or wheat, Zering said.
``You can make a very good living producing hogs on a farm of that size,'' he says. by CNB