TOBACCO; THE SCORNED CROP

Palm Beach Post May 5, 1996

Copyright 1996 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.

CANDY HATCHER

LOUISBURG, N.C.

Steve Lamm’s farm is a place of backaches and sweat, belly-shaking laughter and home-grown vegetable suppers. It’s a place where loyalty is more valuable than a good, hard rain, and being independent is better than having money in the bank.

Life seems simple here.

Steve grows his crop the best he knows how. He doesn’t trust the government. He prays for good weather, hopes for a little luck, and rolls with the punches.

Last summer, for instance. It rained for 23 days in June. A hailstorm demolished a quarter of his crop. Then in July, it didn’t rain at all.

“Considering what it’s been through,” Steve says, pointing toward a field, “I’m tickled to death with it. That right there is what I call a nice piece of tobacco.”

He knows a nice piece of tobacco when he sees it. He’s 49, and he’s been farming this land since 1966. The farm once belonged to his great-great-grandparents, and one day Steve hopes to hand it to his son Stephen, 23.

One day, Stephen will know how to cure a barn of tobacco because Steve will have taught him. He’ll know how to plan for next year’s crop because his daddy will have shown him. He’ll appreciate what it means to be a trustworthy neighbor and a good businessman because that’s the reputation his father has.

When Steve started farming 30 years ago, half of adult America smoked. People used to respect his family business. His biggest problem was finding enough people to help him harvest his crop.

Life has become much more complicated.

Now the federal government, the American Medical Association and a number of states, including Florida, consider Steve Lamm’s crop a pestilence. They want more restrictions and taxes on it. They want to ban exports, restrict advertising and halt smoking in public places. They’re preparing lawsuits, like the one filed by Gov. Lawton Chiles in Palm Beach County in February 1995, to force the $ 45-billion-a-year tobacco industry to pay the medical bills of sick smokers.

When Steve picks up the newspaper or turns on the TV, he hears that those tender sprouts he nurtured for two months in a greenhouse are a blight on humanity.

He reads that the sweet-smelling leaves he so carefully cured in a barn helped kill 435,000 people last year and gave  172,000  others  lung  cancer.  He’s  told  that  his  plants  have  killed  babies  and  caused  heart  disease, emphysema and several kinds of cancer.

Lots of Americans are learning to despise everything linked to the leaf – including people like rock-solid Steve Lamm. That’s hard for him to understand, because 46 million Americans still smoke.

“Everybody who dies and smokes, the death ain’t smoke-related,” says Steve, whose father smoked for decades, quit when he got emphysema, and died of heart failure 24 years later.

“I don’t think it’s the best habit you can have, but the person who smokes it dearly enjoys it.”

Tobacco and the federal government, once existing in cozy symbiosis, have been fighting an increasingly ugly war for 32 years – since a surgeon general first told us smoking was unhealthy.

This year, the industry is facing unprecedented setbacks.

A cigarette manufacturer – The Liggett Group, whose parent company is based in Miami – has agreed to settle lawsuits over its liability for smoking-related illnesses. Former employees of another cigarette maker, Philip Morris, have told the government their company hooked smokers by spiking cigarettes with more nicotine. Texas’ attorney general called the tobacco industry one of “the worst of civilization’s evil empires.” And five criminal investigations are under way to determine whether tobacco executives lied to Congress about the dangers of nicotine.

President Clinton, the AMA, seven states and more than 100 cities echo the American Lung Association’s refrain: Smoking kills one of every four smokers and costs America $ 50 billion a year for medical treatment. Stamp it out.

“Tobacco causes more deaths in North Carolina each year than alcohol, homicide, suicide, heroin and cocaine use, automobile crashes, AIDS and fires combined,” says a leaflet from Project Assist, a program aimed at lowering tobacco-related health problems and deaths in 17 states.

But the people of North Carolina are protective of the crop – their state is the biggest tobacco producer in the nation.

All of the state’s government buildings have smoking zones. Cigarette taxes, 34 cents a pack in Florida, are only a nickel here. And U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, tobacco’s biggest ally in Washington, D.C., keeps getting re-elected.

A grateful tobacco industry has helped renovate the governor’s mansion, brought pro basketball to Charlotte, put money in public schools, and helped build the colleges and medical centers at Duke and Wake Forest universities.

Tobacco  made  North  Carolina  what  it  is  today,  a  farmer  contends.  “The  doctors  harp  on  tobacco,  but  any occupation you look at, tobacco established it, got it going,” says Elmo May, 65, a Louisburg tobacco farmer who smokes two cigarettes a day.

“Government’s been trying to do us in for a long time,” he says. “I reckon they gon’ end up doing away with tobacco, but I don’t think it’ll be in my lifetime.”

It starts in February in the greenhouse, with seeds so tiny you can barely see them. One ounce of seeds will make 300,000 tobacco plants, which produce more than 6 million leaves that are picked, dried, cooked and sold – and eventually made into 75 million cigarettes.

The seeds are dropped in trays and the seedlings nurtured for two months in the greenhouse, a sterile, humid, 80- degree building, until they’re ready for the soil.

This is the only place on Lamm property where cigarettes aren’t allowed. If someone with a trace of tar and nicotine on a hand touches a seedling, a virus called Mosaic can spread through the greenhouse, stunting the plants.

In late April, after the fields get a light rain and a dose of chemicals, Steve declares it’s time to plant his 52 acres of tobacco, a 10-day process. The Lamms and seven workers begin taking the little sprouts from the greenhouse.

Planting is tedious, dirty work on a noisy, slow-moving old transplanter. Four workers sit on the back of the clunky vehicle, feeding plants into wheel-like conveyors that clamp the plant, dig a hole in the ground, stick in the sprout and water it.

The workers wrap themselves in plastic trash bags to protect their warmup pants. Their sneakers are caked with mud. They sit there all day, chilly in the dawn, sweaty in the sunny afternoon, working their backs into a whale of an ache for $ 5.50 an hour.

Son Stephen drives the transplanter, a monotonous job he’s been doing since he was 12 or 13. Perched high in the driver’s seat, he hears only the roar of the engine and the banter of the workers below.

Steve’s in a pickup, driving back and forth between the field and the greenhouse, making sure everything’s running smoothly.

Today, he’s in the old truck, the one marked with scratches and rust and 230,000 miles. One sunburned arm controls the steering wheel, forefinger flying up to say hello whenever anyone passes. When he laughs, which is often, his brown eyes crinkle up and disappear into a round face tinted red-gold by the sun. He’s optimistic. It’s a new season, and farmers always look forward to that.

Steve, a non-smoker who “just never cared” for cigarettes, has been running the farm since the early 1970s, when his father got emphysema. Ed Lamm could not endure the dust, heat and humidity of farm work, so he turned over most responsibilities to Steve.

Steve believes the dust from the open-aired combine his father used on the farm caused the respiratory problems, but he acknowledges smoking probably contributed. “To sit here and tell you cigarettes had nothing to do with it, that would be wrong,” he says. Still, “if you live long enough, something’s gonna get you. Unfortunately, how we live our life” isn’t as important as what we’ve inherited, he says.

He thinks about the things besides genes that have been handed down, the traditions being passed from his father, through him, to his son. He remembers that when he and his wife, Sandy, were just married, they built a little red brick house down the road from his parents. And now, their son is getting married and is fixing up his grandparents’ home to live in. It’s Stephen’s turn, at 23, to master the art of growing tobacco and prepare to run the farm one day.

Steve is up before dawn to get everybody going. At 9, work stops briefly for the traditional Lamm breakfast in the fields – Pepsi and a pack of cheese crackers. Then they’re back at work for a few hours, breaking for a quick lunch before returning to the fields. Most afternoons, it’s just Steve, Stephen and their only full-time employee, Donnell Brodie, preparing for the next day’s work. There are pipes to move, fields to measure, tractors to wash and fuel.

Come ovah he-ah! Steve booms in his Louisburg brogue to his son, and the two meet at the eight vault-like barns where unsold tobacco from last year’s bumper crop is stored.

They open one, revealing the fruits of one acre: a ton and a half of dried, golden leaves. The smell is overpowering. Sweet. Luscious. Autumnal. It makes you want to stand there and just breathe in. “Watch out now,” Steve says with a grin. “You’ll get cancer.”

Sandy, meanwhile, is elbow-deep in her own work: cleaning, running errands, gardening, cooking, paying bills, keeping the farm records and making the best iced tea around.

She is strong-willed and independent, quick to say what’s on her mind. She used to be a bank bookkeeper but quit when Stephen was little, saying her job left her too little time for family and the farm. “Somewhere down the road, you gotta have some roots, some commitment, some caring,” she says. “Everybody’s going, going, going, and there’s no time to share with their family.”

Sometimes, she sees her husband and son only at the end of the day, at supper – the family’s time to talk, tease and relax. Seated beside a wall hanging proclaiming them “Friends of Tobacco,” they feast on the vegetables, roast beef and made-from-scratch chocolate cake Sandy spent the afternoon preparing.

The television is on while they get ready to eat, and a news promotion about the health of women smokers catches Steve’s ear. He shakes his head. “The general public thinks if we’ll just stop growing tobacco, we’ll solve all our health problems,” he says. But the cigarette companies won’t stop making cigarettes. They’ll just buy their tobacco overseas. “Unless they ban smoking, you’re gonna have it. The tobacco companies would continue to operate,” but American farmers would be out of work.

Sandy, the family’s only smoker, kids that she will roll her own cigarettes if the government makes it much harder – or more expensive – to buy them. She’s adamant about her right to enjoy her Winston Ultra-Lights. She’s smoked since she was 16 and says she has no plans to quit. Smoking is a treat, “like eating a bowl of ice cream,” she says.

She tells that to any doctor who tries to discourage her pack-a-day habit – and threatens to find another doctor if the nagging persists.

Sandy didn’t want her son smoking when he was a child, any more than she wanted him drinking coffee or staying out late at night. Choosing to smoke, like choosing to drink or staying out till 2 in the morning, is an adult decision, she says.

Still, Sandy says, there are so many vices worse than having a cigarette. “Smoking doesn’t cause everything. Tobacco’s not killing everybody. I’ve had more friends die young from breast cancer. According to the government, if you even come in contact with one, cigarettes kill you.”

Louisburg is about 45 minutes and a world away from Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital and second-largest city. Once  you  drive  past  the  trendy  shopping  centers  and  new  subdivisions  clustered  around  Raleigh,  the  road becomes a two-lane highway lined with pine, maple and oak trees and the occasional one-stoplight town. You pass a few tobacco farms, and forest after forest – after tobacco, timber is the biggest industry in Franklin County.

When you enter Louisburg, population 3,047, take the business route, up Main Street, past the funeral homes and over the Tar River. Before you get to the neighborhood with century-old homes, you reach downtown, where the pharmacy sells cigarettes and nicotine patches, and a real estate office has a window sticker proclaiming the office a “Friend of Tobacco.” The courthouse in the center of town is decorated with paintings of tobacco harvests and two dried and framed tobacco leaves.

This is a town with a 1950s feel, where residents know most everybody and their business, where people like Steve Lamm leave the keys in the ignition when they stop at the store. If you want a faster pace, go back to Raleigh, where you’ll find traffic reports on the radio and No Smoking signs all over the place.

In Louisburg, it’s OK to smoke.

You can light up at the Murphy House, the barbecue restaurant where tobacco buyers, graders, farmers and warehousemen eat lunch, or in the Town Hall (most people don’t, but “they can if they want to,” says the mayor). At the Food Lion, a No Smoking sign lasted one day.

Although fewer than 1 percent of Franklin County’s 36,400 residents are in tobacco farming full-time, there’s a protective attitude toward the crop. Nearly everyone has some link to tobacco. The county’s biggest tobacco market, Ford Warehouse, sells more heat-processed tobacco than any warehouse in the country – more than $ 30 million worth a year.

Steve Lamm has lived here nearly all his life. “I never have run into an adamant anti-smoker,” he says. “But I don’t travel in those circles. You stay in Franklin County, you’re only gonna run into so many.”

As in most tobacco towns, everybody in Louisburg knows people in their 80s and 90s who have smoked all their lives and are perfectly healthy. Everybody knows people who never smoked but who died of cancer. Everybody says selling cigarettes to kids ought to be against the law. And they all point out that unlike alcohol, cigarettes don’t cause car accidents, break up homes or make people abusive.

They don’t believe all the statistics they hear. “Nobody will ever tell you where 435,000 tobacco-related deaths come from,” Steve Lamm says. “Right here in my little part of the world, I don’t know anybody who’s died of lung cancer.”

He points out that his mother is 76 and still smokes. She lives in a retirement home, and her greatest pleasure – and most calming pastime – is sitting on the front porch, cigarette in hand.

Most believe smoking isn’t bad for everybody. Charlie Ford Jr., an owner of Ford Warehouse, smokes two packs of cigarettes a day. He acknowledges he’s short of breath and coughs more because he smokes.

“I need to quit. I want to quit. But I think smoking – the medical people use too broad a brush with it. . . . My father’s 86 and has smoked all his life and is in perfect health.”

Some, like Raymond Burnette, a developer and tobacco grower, say cigarettes aren’t addictive. He has cut his smoking to a pack a day from three. He acknowledges he has “a touch of emphysema” because of cigarettes.

“It’s habit-forming, but it’s not addictive,” he says. “If it were addictive, I couldn’t quit. And I quit for nine months.”

By midsummer, the tobacco leaves are 2 feet long, green and yellow-green, 23 or so to a stalk. The thickest and sweetest of them – the ones with the most nicotine – are at the top of the plant. They have no smell or taste, and until they’re baked for seven days in a barn, they’re worthless.

Each plant grows little white blossoms, but they have no lovely scent – even bees don’t like them. The blooms suck in nutrients that should be fed to the leaves, so they’re pulled off the stalk, or “topped,” to make the leaves grow thick and strong.

Topping is the worst job of all, says Malissia Dean, one of the local workers pulling off the flowers and tossing them on the ground. She has worked around tobacco all her life, and she won’t touch a cigarette. “My husband died of lung cancer,” she says.

Malissia, like the others, wears long sleeves and pants to protect her from the heat. The workers are wringing wet with sweat, and a gummy residue coats their hands.

After the last bloom is yanked off, it’s time to begin harvesting – 10 weeks of pulling first the bottom, then the middle, then the top leaves from the plants. Local workers head to the shade for the less strenuous – and less lucrative – chore of putting tobacco in the curing barns while six migrant laborers from Mexico work in the fields.

Nearly every farm in Franklin County uses migrant workers because local labor for the hot field work is hard to find. Migrant workers are paid $ 60 for the morning-long task of harvesting enough tobacco for one barn. They work about six hours a day, six days a week, from June until October. When they finish in the tobacco fields, they return to Mexico. In January, their cycle begins again: harvesting sugar in the towns around Belle Glade, then picking oranges in Fort Pierce, onions in Georgia, and sometimes blueberries near the North Carolina coast.

Starting at 6 a.m., the only cool a mid-July morning offers, the migrant workers stoop among the plants, some of which are 6 feet tall, to reach leaves 6 inches from the ground. The only sound is that of leaves snapping from the stalks, like popcorn popping.

Once the workers have filled a flatbed trailer with leaves, the trailer is taken from the field to the farm. There, eight local workers – the same ones who planted the fields in April – are filling a gas-heated barn with about 3,000 pounds of leaves. Their morning’s work – loading one barn, unloading another – is worth $ 30.

The leaves will cook in the barn for seven days at temperatures and humidity levels Steve checks every few hours. By the seventh day, the leaves are preserved and will keep for years.

“It’s sort of an art to it,” Steve says. Cook too fast and the leaves scald. Too slow, and they’re brown as a paper bag. It’s like baking a cake. “You try to get the top golden and the middle cooked and none of it burned.”

When it’s done right, the leaves are orange and golden and the smell is full-bodied. Earthy. Similar to the way a new cigarette smells, but so much better.

Charlie Thomas, one of the local workers, is helping “sheet” the tobacco – gathering it in burlap sheets, 200 pounds at a time. He stops to smoke one of the 40 cigarettes he will inhale today. He says he knows it isn’t good for him, but “I’ve seen people have cancer, and they don’t smoke.”

A few hours earlier, Charlie had been offered a package of peanuts, but he wouldn’t take it. He won’t touch peanuts, he says, because he watched a toddler brother choke to death on one many years ago.

Charlie has another brother who talks through a voice box – the result of throat cancer. That brother can no longer smoke, but he doesn’t blame cigarettes for his cancer. Once or twice, Charlie has seen him hold a lighted cigarette to his throat as though he could still coax pleasure from it.

And “if I want a cigarette,” Charlie says, “he’ll go buy me one.”

It’s time to sell the crop. Step into Ford Warehouse on the outskirts of Louisburg and overwhelm your senses.

There’s 1.5 million pounds of tobacco, stacked in burlap bundles on a concrete floor as wide as a football field and the length of nearly two.

Inhale. Multiply that smell coming out of Steve Lamm’s barn by 500 and you’ve got it. More flue-cured tobacco is sold in this expansive aluminum storeroom than anywhere else in the country.

Now listen to the voices: the chanting auctioneer’s monotone as he moves down the rows of tobacco piles, selling one every 3.5 seconds; the murmur of USDA graders, deciding in an instant the quality of each pile; the boisterous banter of the farmers waiting for their checks.

They have arrived throughout the morning in pickups and flatbed trucks, delivering piles of tobacco for next week’s auction and watching the auctioneer sell what they brought last week. They call each other by first name. They know immediately who the bigwigs are when they pass them on Bickett Boulevard.

“Usually,” Steve Lamm explains, “this time of year, you see a late model Oldsmobile or Buick on the road, you know it’s somebody in the tobacco business,” somebody from one of the cigarette manufacturers. “You see one come through with a chauffeur, it’s the head man in charge of purchasing leaf for a company.”

It’s hot, humid and extremely busy at the warehouse. The selling here, at two other warehouses in Louisburg and at dozens of others across the South, will last about three months, through October.

At 8:30 a.m., the auctioneer starts his chant: “Five, five, 85, 84, dollar, Taylor!” Next pile: “Five, five, dollar, 84, dollar 84, dollar, Standard.” The buyers hold up four fingers, signifying a $ 1.84 per pound bid. These piles, each holding 150 to 250 pounds of tobacco, will go to manufacturers such as Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson.

By midmorning, the buyers are carrying towels to wipe sweat from their foreheads. They move at a fast clip. In 7 minutes, they’ve bought enough to make 10.9 million cigarettes.

Steve has a little more than 5,000 pounds of his best tobacco on the floor, and he’s there early to see how his leaves have been graded.

A warehouse manager sees him standing by, notices the grade on Steve’s tobacco is too low and rushes off toward the graders, asking them to take a second look. They study Steve’s tobacco, checking its color and texture. Then they raise the grade, and the buyers pay $ 1.87 a pound – 3 cents more – for those piles.

Steve is all smiles. He’s $ 150 richer because the grade was increased. “It makes a difference being here,” he says. His 24 piles of tobacco will bring about $ 9,100 after the warehouse takes its cut: $ 360.

He heads back to the farm, and tobacco company employees begin carting the piles of tobacco into trucks, to be taken to manufacturing plants sprinkled throughout the South. It could be months, sometimes a year or more, before the leaves are crushed, other ingredients added, cigarettes rolled, packaged and sent to the 7-Eleven.

Years ago, farmers and cigarette manufacturers worked together to keep public opinion of tobacco high and taxes low. The companies bought nearly all of their tobacco from American farmers and donated millions of dollars for community projects. The public associated tobacco products with the honest, weather-beaten faces of the farmers, and they bought cigarettes. The farmers and manufacturers made money. The government kept a low profile.

Things have changed.

Government tightly controls the tobacco farmer’s crop, limiting what can be grown and sold. It also reaps a $ 12 billion harvest from tobacco – the federal government gets 24 cents from the sale of a pack of cigarettes; the farmer gets a nickel.

Tobacco companies have taught farmers in Brazil, Zimbabwe, China and other countries to grow the crop more cheaply than in America. Now more than 40 percent of the tobacco in our cigarettes comes from overseas.

Fewer Americans are smoking. In 1965, more than half the adult population smoked. Now, smokers represent one- quarter of Americans.

Cigarette manufacturers are not as philanthropic these days. They’re spending millions of dollars fighting lawsuits.

More evidence that tobacco companies have been greedy and dishonest comes out every week, and some farmers say they’re not surprised. They say they haven’t trusted the manufacturers for years. Others, including the Lamms, are surprised and disappointed – though still somewhat skeptical of everything the media report.

They say they’ve known since the 1980s that to the manufacturers, “the almighty dollar’s more important than anything else.” But they wanted to believe they could trust these companies that have been buying their tobacco for decades. Now, they say they can’t.

“If they went to the point of adding nicotine strictly for the purpose of hooking people on cigarettes,” Steve says, “that’s wrong.”

David Altman, a medical school professor who spent a year studying North Carolina tobacco farmers, says farmers have no reason to trust the manufacturers.

Since the 1950s, he said, the farmers’ share of tobacco profits has dropped 80 percent while the manufacturers’ share increased 64 percent. Because the government limits how much tobacco farmers grow and sell, farmers can’t increase their dwindling share of the profits.

Many farmers became disgusted and got out of the business. Now there aren’t many young farmers learning to grow tobacco. Of Franklin County’s 220 full-time tobacco farmers, only a handful are younger than 30.

“The writing’s on the wall,” said Altman, an associate professor at Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston- Salem, N.C. “Unless something is done to help them out, (farmers are) running out of time.”

Steve Lamm knows the future is uncertain, that family farms are being swallowed by corporate farms, that the government may regulate him out of business. He knows the tobacco companies have hurt his cause.

“But are you gon’ bite the hand that feeds you?” he asks. The tobacco companies are “big, big business. They got friends  in  high  places.  And  if  they  didn’t,  we’d  be  out  of  business  right  now.  If  they  prove  this  stuff about manipulating the nicotine, it may put them out of business.

“And if they go, we go.”

Steve doesn’t usually read Ann Landers, but the other day something in her advice column caught his eye.

A woman had written that her husband couldn’t get through a meal without smoking a cigarette, and she wondered what to do. Ann Landers replied: “The poor fellow is hostage to an addiction worse than cocaine. He may pay for it with his life.”

Steve, normally easygoing, was incensed. “I was sitting here thinking, ‘How many folks ever broke in a house for a pack of cigarettes?’ ” Landers’ message, he says, is that if you have a choice between cocaine and a cigarette, choose cocaine.

Some tobacco defenders say all the hype about nicotine manipulation is simply the anti-tobacco movement trying to make people believe a lighted cigarette is a death wish.

They say people are singling out tobacco when other vices do much more harm. “It may take 30 years to kill you with cigarettes,” Sandy Lamm points out, “but it don’t take long to kill you with booze.”

She and other farmers wonder: Instead of imposing so many restrictions on tobacco, which is perfectly legal, why doesn’t the federal government try to control immigration? Or drugs? Or guns? Why doesn’t it worry about whether beer ads are aimed at teenagers?

As government tightens its grip on their livelihood, and the life that used to be simple becomes increasingly filled with regulations, these good-hearted farmers remain optimistic. Eventually, all this will blow over, they say, and things will be all right.

Serious-minded son Stephen is confident enough to be planning his life around tobacco. A wife. Children someday. They’ll join him on the tractor, the same as he did with his father, and Stephen will teach them the joys of tobacco farming.

“And if I’m half as good as my daddy,” he says, “I’ll be happy.”

Tobacco pays the bills

Tobacco can be a lucrative crop if the farmer is diligent. An acre of tobacco can bring $ 4,000 to $ 5,000, with about one-fourth of that profit.

Steve, Sandy and Stephen Lamm made 80 percent of their income from 40 acres of tobacco last year. The other 20 percent came from growing 100 acres of wheat and 250 acres of soybeans.

“No other source of income can compare with tobacco,” Steve says. Soybeans are good for the land, but they’re only a break-even crop. Wheat doesn’t require much work, and it’s good for the soil, but it doesn’t pay for itself, he says.

Why not turn to another crop? “The market is flooded in sweet potatoes, cucumbers, green peppers. I don’t think there’s anything else to be grown other than corn and soybeans,” says Sandy Lamm. There’s too much rain, and the soil is too poor for corn. Cotton is expensive to start up, and the Lamms’ land isn’t suitable for it anyway.

If the Lamms sold all of their 180,000-pound quota they would gross more than $ 300,000. But their expenses – $47,000 for fertilizer and chemicals alone – eat most of that. Profits go into new equipment, repairs and the retirement account.

The past few years, Steve says, they’ve been able to pay their bills without help from the bank – the mark of success for a farmer. “We barely make it sometimes from season to season without doing that,” he says.

Uncle Sam controls the crop

The federal government controls how much tobacco is grown and sold.

It limits Steve Lamm to planting 90 acres of tobacco and selling 180,000 pounds. In exchange for limiting the amount on the market, the government guarantees that Steve – and every other tobacco farmer – will be able to sell what he grows. If cigarette manufacturers don’t buy a farmer’s tobacco, a government-administered cooperative buys it and sells it later.

The government’s tobacco program was taxpayer-supported until 1982, when a federal law required that the program not cost taxpayers. Now, farmers and the tobacco companies pay the operating costs of the cooperatives. When farmers take out government loans, they’re required to pay them back with interest. Taxpayers still pay the $30 million-a-year administrative costs of tracking tobacco allotments and sales.

The program stabilizes a market that would otherwise fluctuate wildly, become oversaturated with tobacco and drive small farmers out of business. Officials also contend the restrictions force farmers to focus on quality, not quantity.