Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [39]
From that society I sallied out into a world where, to my surprise, farmer was widely presumed synonymous with hee-haw, and tobacco was the new smallpox. I remember standing in someone’s kitchen once at a college party—one of those intensely conversational gatherings of the utterly enlightened—listening while everyone present agreed on the obvious truth about tobacco: it should be eliminated from this planet and all others. I blurted out, foolishly, “But what about the tobacco farmers?”
You’d have thought I’d spoken up for child porn. Somebody asked, “Why should I care about tobacco farmers?”
I’m still struggling to answer that. Yes, I do know people who’ve died wishing they’d never seen a cigarette. Yes, it’s a plant that causes cancer after a long line of people (postfarmer) have specifically altered and abused it. And yes, it takes chemicals to keep the blue mold off the crop. And it sends people to college. It makes house payments, buys shoes, and pays doctor bills. It allows people to live with their families and shake hands with their neighbors in one of the greenest, kindest places in all this world. Tobacco is slowly going extinct as a U.S. crop, and that is probably a sign of good civic sense, but it’s also a cultural death when all those who grew it must pack up, go find an apartment somewhere, and work in a factory. What is family farming worth?
Most 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. Extension services and agriculture schools throughout the region have anticipated 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 entire 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 livelihood, had to be plowed back into the dirt, in the end worth more as compost 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 deranged, and how direly it is stacked against the farmer.
The search for a good substitute crop is still on, but now that the modest 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 perishable 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 occasionally 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 offers farmers expert advice on creating management plans for the wooded hillsides that typically occupy so much of the acreage of local farms. Mature 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