Despite buyout, tobacco still thrives here

The United States has fewer smokers, a shrinking base of cigarette factories and no more federal price supports for tobacco. But as tobacco farming has receded in many parts of the country, a bevy of Eastern North Carolina counties have picked up the slack.

The state's number of tobacco farmers has dropped dramatically from 10,000 in 2004 to about 5,000 in 2006, according to the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina. Yet tobacco production has soared in counties along or within an hour's drive east of Interstate 95. Farmers in that area are as busy now as they have been for generations -- spraying tobacco, chopping weeds, topping off flowers and preparing for their first harvests of the prehistoric-looking plant.

Johnston County leads the state's pack in production. It grew 22.3 million pounds of flue-cured tobacco in 2006, up 25 percent since the 2004 buyout. Flue-cured is the most common variety of tobacco, used mainly in cigarettes.

"If you zig when everyone else zags," said Brent Pope, a fourth-generation tobacco farmer near Kenly, "you open up a market."

The 2004 federal tobacco buyout ended nearly seven decades of a quota system that dictated how much tobacco could be grown where. The system had kept prices high for U.S. leaf but made cigarette manufacturers increasingly reliant on foreign-grown tobacco. Today, the United States, once the world's dominant tobacco grower, contributes only about 5 percent of global production.

Still, tobacco remains a profitable U.S. crop. It's a $1.2 billion industry. And North Carolina maintains its status as the nation's leading producer. In 2006, the state supplied about 70 percent of U.S.-grown flue-cured tobacco, up from 66 percent before the buyout.

Anticipating a fall in prices after the end of the quota system, many North Carolina farmers took the buyout as an opportunity to retire. The buyout pays farmers and others who owned the rights to grow tobacco for their investments in the program. Between 2005 and 2014, it will give North Carolinians about $3.8 billion.

In Wake County, the buyout was a tipping point for those who had already felt urban growth closing in.

David Holland and his son used to rent land to grow tobacco, but they tired of competing with development in the Fuquay-Varina area. "It's hard to rent it with people putting houses on it," Holland, 67, said.

So they switched gears. The Hollands covered a hole in an old tobacco barn a car had once run through and opened a vegetable stand, selling snap beans, tomatoes, onions and cabbage to their new neighbors.

Tobacco Road: I-95

In the state's I-95 corridor, meanwhile, the buyout represented newfound freedom.

Under the quota system, tobacco farmers sometimes drove their tractors miles out to reach small fields with government allotment. After the buyout, they could put tobacco on any farm they thought would sustain it. Pope, who tends 185 acres of tobacco with his 72-year-old father and an uncle, said it has made tobacco farming more efficient.

"You don't have to have a half-acre here or two acres there," Pope said.

Agronomists say flue-cured tobacco also gravitated to where the crop naturally grows best. It shifted away from fringe areas, such as the Piedmont and coastal counties. And it expanded in the I-95 corridor, which enjoys an abundance of relatively cheap, flat land with the sandy loam tobacco plants love and a critical mass of diehard growers.

Meanwhile, states such as Georgia and Florida, where production was expected to rise after the buyout because of their multiple growing seasons, instead saw a decline due to disease, said Blake Brown, a professor of agriculture economics at N.C. State University.