Shortly after sunrise, James Roach walks through a warehouse door in Wentworth, N.C., with an armload of vegetables.
He lays bags of freshly picked produce - from staples like spinach to the more exotic like purple peppers - on a table inside and begins affixing bar code stickers as other farmers arrive. Most tote boxes and bags of fresh vegetables. Others bring goat cheese, or beef and pork raised on homemade feed.
![]()
Before the sun sets on this Thursday in October, the products from farms in a half-dozen or so counties will be in the kitchens of restaurants and homes in the Piedmont Triad area. Buyers actually put in their orders on a website where approximately 40 growers had posted their latest offerings.
The idea: to connect the small farmer with the buyer who wants locally grown food through an online farmers' market. The result: Piedmont Local Food, which launched in April.
The venture - which an organizer said "took off like gangbusters" - launched with help from tobacco settlement money. It is one of a myriad of endeavors taking root in the Piedmont of both North Carolina and Virginia as the region seeks its financial footing in a post-tobacco economy.
Roach used to raise tobacco himself. "I saw the tobacco industry going down and figured it might be a good thing to get out of," he says.
Now, after a stint as a sheet metal machine operator, he grows vegetables instead on his farm in Caswell County, N.C. "I've done better than I thought I would," he said.
Just across the state line, the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research stands on a hill in Danville. It was started with tobacco settlement money and designed to be a catalyst for economic and high-tech activity in the post-tobacco Piedmont, centered in the city that once functioned as the nucleus of the area's tobacco industry. Buyers and sellers poured in from farms far and wide for auctions in the city's tobacco warehouses.
The auction system is long-gone, a relic of the tobacco industry that once provided ample fuel for the Piedmont region's economic engine in both North Carolina and Virginia. The area's economy has faltered, in no small measure due to the tobacco industry's decline, which dovetailed with downturns in textile and furniture manufacturing.
The one-two-three punch left Piedmont workers, many of whom had little or no post-secondary education, without jobs in an economy that has become increasingly knowledge-driven.
Rockingham County had an unemployment rate of 11.4 percent in August. Six months earlier, the rate hit 15.1 percent, according to the state's Employment Security Commission.
Unemployment in Danville stood at 12.4 percent in August, down slightly from 12.9 percent in February, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The future of once tobacco-dependent and now economically challenged places like southern Campbell County, Danville and Rockingham County might lie in a petri dish. There are thousands of petri dishes and other pieces of research equipment inside the IALR's gleaming structure of brick, glass and steel.
Researchers at the six-year-old institute explore four areas: polymers, mechanical engineering and robotic systems, high-value horticulture and forestry, and motorsports engineering.
Its sustainable and renewable resources arm targets plant biology in order to create new plants, crops and bio-based products to give a new economic reason for being to an area that once depended heavily on tobacco.
If discoveries have commercial applications, the institute will work to make them available to the market. Its creators hope the work will attract companies seeking access to its expertise. IALR also is planning to create a spinoff of its own, a tissue-propagation company in Danville.
The institute's stated goal is to become "a catalyst for economic and community transformation." Other transformative agents are advanced learning programs, advanced networking and technology, and community outreach.
IALR partnered with three founding educational institutions: Virginia Tech, Averett University and Danville Community College.
Next-door to the institute, a building is going up to house SEnTeC, the research and development center for sustainable energy and technology in Southern Virginia. Among other things, it will continue IALR's work on biomass crops, as well as determining the feasibility of building bio-refineries in the area. SEnTeC, too, started with tobacco settlement funds.
The settlement money
That money is the result of relief sought in court during the 1990s by states reeling from public health costs associated with treating sick smokers.
"Big tobacco" made two settlements. The first was with the four states that initially sought relief, while the second, the Master Settlement Agreement, was with the remaining 46 states, including Virginia and North Carolina.
In that agreement, four of the nation's largest cigarette makers committed to pay approximately $206 billion to the 46 states over the first 25 years. Of that, North Carolina's share came to about $4.6 billion and Virginia's to an estimated $4.1 billion, both over 25 years.
The settlement agreements number among major recent developments in the story of tobacco, which played a significant role in shaping the economy and culture of Piedmont North Carolina and Virginia.
Dixie Watts Dalton, an agricultural economist who taught at Virginia Tech for 17 years, has studied the economic impact of tobacco on Southside Virginia for years. She currently is developing an agribusiness program at Southside Virginia Community College.
Dalton knew tobacco in a personal way. Her father raised it until he took the buyout offered in 2004 to end the quota system. She grew tobacco herself to pay her way through college at Virginia Tech, then graduate school.
Today, she said, health concerns that led to decreased demand for tobacco, coupled with the removal of the quota system and related changes, have had a domino effect well beyond the tobacco fields. An economy had grown up around tobacco - with any number of local businesses, such as auction warehouses and banks, dependant on tobacco, too.
"This is one of the most far-reaching policy changes we've seen since the Depression," she said.
Time for adjustment
The agricultural economy that relied on tobacco has entered an adjustment period as it seeks a new equilibrium between supply and demand, Dalton said.
Piedmont-area leaders and residents are adjusting, too, looking for new economic endeavors and funding to support them.
Piedmont Local Food, for example, received $44,500 from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund, and another $30,000 from tobacco settlement money earmarked for cost-share grants to farmers and collaborative projects through an organization called RAFI-USA.
Piedmont Local Food received tobacco settlement money because one major goal for use of the funds is to spur economic activity and development in areas that for generations had depended heavily on tobacco. The funds are also meant to be used to promote better health.
Funding went to the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, which helped create the online farmers' market with help from the Rockingham County local food coalition and the Rockingham County Business and Technology Center. The group, led by Rockingham Cooperative Extension Services Director Brenda Sutton, used a program in Rutherford County outside of Charlotte as its template.
Education opportunities
Tobacco settlement funds have also helped provide retraining for people who live in tobacco-dependent areas. One such program is at Rockingham County (N.C.) Community College.
The community college received a grant to buy 15 programmable logic controllers. The computers now run nearly every piece of machinery in nearly every plant across the country.
"Programmable logic controllers are essentially the brains of an industrial process," says Keith Elliott, the lead instructor.
The funds helped fill a specific need for people trained to run the brains at MillerCoors has one of its breweries in nearby Eden, where it employs 600 people.
"This is not just Miller," says Elliott. "It's every company out there."
The community college also received funds to buy special welding equipment on which students can learn advanced skills needed to work on stainless steel.
The ability to weld stainless steel is needed in a number of industries, especially food, says David White, the lead instructor.
It's not intro welding. The level of expertise students can now develop is "about as advanced as you can go," White says.
Students have been pushing to get into both classes, and others.
"Every program out here has had to turn people away this semester, which is sad," Elliott says.
Rockingham Community College President Robert Keys says he's grateful for the roughly $150,000 RCC received for the programmable logic controllers from tobacco settlement funding, along with other funding.
But given Rockingham County's relatively high unemployment rate and need for retraining, the county needs more and deserves its fair share, he says.
Other programs
In preparation to receive tobacco settlement funds and give such help, North Carolina set up three different programs. The Health and Wellness Trust Fund receives 25 percent of the state's allocation and make grants for health-related programs. The Tobacco Trust Fund Commission uses another 25 percent to help tobacco growers and those displaced from tobacco-related businesses, among other things.
Finally, there's the Golden LEAF Foundation. Half the state's allotment goes to the non-profit foundation, which makes grants for economic development in tobacco-dependent communities.
"We're the biggest tobacco-growing state there is," says Dan Gerlach, president of the Golden LEAF Foundation.
So North Carolina would feel the impact of the downturn in tobacco most keenly and likely will have the greatest resulting need.
So far, Golden LEAF has funded 971 grants, totaling more than $459 million.
Impact
In Virginia, the state Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission has made more than 1,200 grants for a total of more than $650 million over the past decade or so. That money is credited with creating more than 6,200 jobs in Southside and Southwest Virginia - the Commonwealth's tobacco region.
The goal is to reduce dependence on tobacco and to help create a 21st-century economy, says Timothy Pfohl, the commission's grants program director.
"Our mission is to diversify the economic base," Pfohl says.
Some projects resulting from tobacco commission funding in Virginia include:
More than $120 million to extend broadband into unserved or underserved areas;
Creation of the King School of Medicine on the border of Southwest Virginia and Tennessee, a $25 million venture;
A $7.6 million grant to Lynchburg's Center for Advanced Engineering and Research for creation of a nuclear research facility in Bedford County, part of a $100 million commitment to establish research centers in the tobacco region;
Encouraging cultural and heritage tourism through such things as the Crooked Road Music Trail that winds through the tobacco region.
The toppling of tobacco as a pillar of the Piedmont economy has hurt local economies, of course. It has also led to innovations large and small, such as those at IALR and the Piedmont Local Food online farmers' market.
There have also been efforts to find new uses for the tobacco plant itself, such as a pharmaceutical delivery vehicle.
But Dalton, the agricultural economist, says even if efforts to find a new use for tobacco were to succeed, they likely wouldn't require acreage on a level anywhere near that were needed for smoking and related tobacco products.
In the meantime, many farmers who once raised tobacco and still want to work the land have increased the acreage they devote to raising cattle, fruits and other crops, Dalton said.
Other crops
Some farmers are hoping to cash in on America's growing ardor for wine. Vineyards now dot the Virginia and North Carolina countryside, drawing not only product dollars but also tourist dollars.
Despite seeds of change growing in the post-tobacco-settlement Piedmont, Dalton said they have yet to flower fully. And none is likely to create a demand and profit potential that would equal that of tobacco.
So, when Dalton looks at the changing landscape, she sees "no one thing that could just come in and fill that gap that tobacco left."
Scott Shoular, the now-retired Rockingham County director of Cooperative Extension Services, would agree that there is no one new, new thing.
For now, Shoular said, "If you ride around Piedmont North Carolina and, I think, Virginia, you'll find a lot of houses planted on that land." Enditem
