Downsized Tobacco

Source from:  Associated Press Friday, March 10, 2006 HAHIRA, Ga. (AP) 03/13/2006

Tobacco farmers like Fred Wetherington are becoming a rarity. About 60 percent of Georgia's one-thousand tobacco growers have called it quits since the ten billion dollar federal tobacco buyout of 2004, and nearly half have done the same in all Southeastern states that produce flue-cured tobacco. Wetherington grows 600 acres in south Georgia and sells his lef directly to the major tobacco company Philip Morris USA. He says "We're trying to hang in there. Our attitude is to take it easy for the next few years, not make any long-term commitments and see what our margins are." Before the buyout, about 15-thousand farmers grew flue-cured tobacco in five states -- Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida -- but since then, between six-thousand to 75-hundred have stopped growing it, according to Arnold Hamm, general manager of the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative of Raleigh, North Carolina. Hamm said some were older farmers who used their buyout cash to transition into retirement. The buyout ended 70 years of government subsidies on a crop that had been a mainstay of Southern agriculture for 400 years, starting with the Jamestown Colony in Virginia -- a venture that would not have survived without profits from the golden leaf. Even the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative has had to reinvent itself. The co-op used to manage the federal tobacco program, but now buys tobacco from farmers, processes it at a plant at Timberlake, North Carolina. The production of flue-cured tobacco, one of Georgia's top cash crops since the 1930s, has been declining throughout the Southeast for years because of reduced cigarette consumption and stiffer foreign competition. Enditem