In Henry and Washington counties, it is more than one in four jobs. In Bracken County, it's four in 10. Those are the places Danny McKinney, executive director of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, mentions when he talks about tobacco's economic effect on parts of rural Kentucky. Farmers spend their money at all those places. In Owen County, they spend money at the Southern States store, where manager John Layton says fertilizer sales are a fourth of his business, and tobacco farmers buy most of it.
Tobacco gives the economy an annual boost.
A lot of tobacco farmers have other sources of income, but when they sell their burley crop in late November or December, they're more likely to come into Larry Tackett's Mens Wear on Main Street for a new suit. Trust Co. The tobacco farmer provides the raw material for a multibillion-dollar industry, but gets a small share of the proceeds. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that for every dollar spent on cigarettes, the farmer gets 4 cents. But that money is spread to others through purchases of labor, fuel, equipment and lunch at places like the Scoopy Doo. In places like Owen County, where the sign advertising an industrial park is at the beginning of a short blacktop road to nowhere, people are worried about what would happen if the tobacco money started drying up.