The following is an online extra from the "Tobacco Town" feature in our June issue, heading to newsstands soon.
Halifax County farmer Garland Comer works in his newly planted tobacco field. While acknowledging a declining customer base nationally, Comer says, "There will always be smokers." (Photo by Brittany Comer)
Garland Comer’s family has been raising tobacco in Halifax County for five generations.
He expects to continue that tradition.
“There will always be tobacco grown — I’m not sure about the quantity of tobacco — and there will always be smokers,” Comer says.
At age 33, he believes the future of tobacco farming lies with younger growers who will bring modern, more efficient farming methods to the fields in Southside Virginia’s historic “Old Belt” tobacco region.
He freely acknowledges that the number of smokers in the U.S. is declining, and he anticipates the number of tobacco growers will continue to decline with it.
But he says tobacco floats on a world market — China alone has 300 million smokers, according to the World Health Organization — and the tobacco Comer grows on 280 acres is sold in multiple markets, although over the years Altria Group has been his main customer.
Besides tobacco, Comer grows 750 acres of soybeans, 200 acres of wheat and 120 acres of corn as part of a farming operation that unfolds over nearly 1,400 acres.
But tobacco is his cash crop.
“Tobacco is king. None of this would work without tobacco in this part of the country,” he says.
Across Virginia, statistics from the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services indicate that the number of tobacco farms and tobacco acreage has been plunging.
In 2000, Virginia farmers harvested 25,900 acres of tobacco. By 2019, that had fallen to 17,940 acres. The number of tobacco farms has dropped even more dramatically, from 4,184 farms in 2000 to 306 in 2017.
The trend has irreversibly been toward fewer farms with more acreage.
Comer has been raising tobacco since he was 17 years old, when he took over farming operations from his grandfather, who used the money he received from the 2004 federal tobacco buyout and retired.
Nationwide, other farmers did the same, or simply used the money they received as an opportunity to add to their acreage, quit or shift to other crops or other careers. The buyout was an effort by the government to help tobacco growers transition away from raising tobacco, as market volatility increased under a free-market system.
Prior to the buyout, under a program that began in the 1930s, tobacco farmers operated under a price support system that placed quotas on how much they could grow. That, in turn, limited the amount of tobacco they could sell. By limiting supply, demand for tobacco increased and prices were more predictable.
In 2004, Congress decided to end the program, saying farmers could raise as much tobacco as they wanted. But the price stability growers had previously known — and their safety net — also ended and volatility loomed.
To help growers transition away from raising tobacco, the legislation ending the quotas also established a $9.4 billion buyout called the Tobacco Transition Payment Program. The program stretched out over 10 years and ended in 2014. The buyout was funded by assessments on tobacco manufacturers and importers.
“It was one of the biggest changes to the industry. We refer to it as pre-buyout vs. post-buyout,” says Stephen Barts, an extension agent for agriculture and natural resources in Pittsylvania County.
Barts’ family also has been growing tobacco for about five generations, and his brother is still in the business.
Altogether, Barts says Pittsylvania County had about 6,000 acres of tobacco under cultivation in 2018.
That made it the largest tobacco-growing county by acreage in Virginia, according to data compiled by National Agricultural Statistics Service’s Virginia Field Office.
“For us in this part of the world, tobacco is by far the most high-valued crop on a per-acre basis that we can grow,” Barts says.
David Reed, an extension agronomist for tobacco in Blackstone, paints a bleak picture for Virginia’s tobacco farmers this year.
“The tobacco industry is and has been on a steady decline for many years and tobacco farmers in Virginia will especially feel this for the 2019 season. We have a number of growers who did not get marketing contracts, so they will not be growing this year and our overall acreage will be reduced, as well as the prices paid for the tobacco by some purchasers,” Reed says.
The driving force behind the current decline, he says via email, is that worldwide tobacco producers have caught up with the quality of American-grown tobacco, and have made it available to manufacturers at a lower cost.
The trade war with China also has had a chilling effect on the demand for U.S. tobacco, Reed says.
For farmers such as Garland Comer, tobacco is their highest-value crop per acre. (Photo by Brittany Comer)
According to the World Health Organization, fewer people are smoking overall, but tobacco use is increasing in parts of Africa and the Middle East. The WHO estimated that there were 1.1 billion smokers worldwide in 2015, a decrease of 29 million since 2000. About 80 percent of the smokers lived in low- and middle-income countries, according to the report.
Despite the cloudy outlook, Garland Comer remains philosophical about the years ahead.
“There’s always been uncertainty with tobacco,” he says. “I mean since the first leaf was grown and shipped back to England, I’ve always heard that there’s been uncertainty in tobacco.
“It’s all in what you want to put your neck out on the line for,” Comer says.
