molly mooching 75Most tobacco farmers wish they could grow something else. As of
now, most will have to. Federal price supports, which have safeguarded
the tobacco livelihood since the Depression, officially ended in 2005. Ex-
tension services and agriculture schools throughout the region have an-
ticipated that deadline for more than twenty years, hoping to come up
with a high- value crop to replace tobacco. No clear winner has yet
emerged. When I was in high school, the family of one of my best friends
tried growing bell peppers, the latest big idea of the era. They lost the en-
tire year’s income when the promised markets failed to materialize. I still
get a knot in my stomach remembering the day their field of beautiful
peppers, representing months of the family’s labor and their year’s liveli-
hood, had to be plowed back into the dirt, in the end worth more as com-
post than as anything else. If people out in the world were irate about the
human damage of tobacco, why wouldn’t they care enough—and pay
enough—to cover the costs of growing vegetables? I can date from that
moment my awareness of how badly our food production system is de-
ranged, and how direly it is stacked against the farmer.
The search for a good substitute crop is still on, but now that the mod-
est price supports have ended, farmers in tobacco country have only a
year or two more to figure out how to stay on their land. Vegetables are a
high-value crop, especially if they’re organic, but only in areas that have
decent markets for them and a good infrastructure for delivering perish-
able goods to these markets. The world’s most beautiful tomato, if it can’t
get into a shopper’s basket in less than five days, is worth exactly nothing.
Markets and infrastructure depend on consumers who will at least occa-
sionally choose locally grown foods, and pay more than rock- bottom
prices.
In my county, two of the best tobacco- transition experiments to date
are organic vegetables and sustainable lumber. A program in our area of-
fers farmers expert advice on creating management plans for the wooded
hillsides that typically occupy so much of the acreage of local farms. Ma-
ture trees can be harvested carefully from these woodlots in a way that
leaves the forests healthy and sustainably productive. The logs are milled
into lumber, kiln- dried, and sold to regional buyers seeking alternatives to
rain-forest teak or clear- cut redwood. When we needed new oak fl ooring