The government is reaping a bonanza while telling people not to smoke. Farmers, meanwhile, are getting told to plant less and less acreage in tobacco. The government sets quotas based on estimates of how much demand there will be for tobacco that year, and a farmer must comply with that limitation. There was an 18 percent cut in the quota for this growing season, Dixon says. That brings the total reduction in the quota to 53 percent since 1997 the first year I visited.
Smoking is on the decline, hence there is less demand for tobacco.
That's good news for public health, but tobacco farmers are hit hard by that change. Faced with a 53 percent cut in potential earnings over the past four years, farmers are struggling. So are some of the small communities where they spend their money. The farm economy is about as low as it's ever been, says Dixon, who is a farmer as well as co-owner of the tobacco warehouse. Those prices are about what farmers received when Dixon started farming 30 years ago after attending N.C. State.