Kentucky agriculture has moved beyond tobacco. Some wonder what’s been lost.

By Liam Niemeyer | Kentucky Lantern

CLARK COUNTY, Ky. – Kenneth Anderson’s father taught him what to look for in high-qual­i­ty tobac­co, cured for weeks in the rafters of a Clark County barn. How to “grade” or rate the qual­i­ty of the dif­fer­ent parts of the plant, look­ing for slight vari­a­tions of the deep brown col­or of the dried leaves. 

“Tobacco’s always been a crop that you sur­vived on,” Anderson said as he drove his truck over the rolling hills of his land on an ear­ly September morn­ing. “Tobacco paid the bills. It paid for the farm. It sent kids to school.”

Growing the cash crop is a part of a fam­i­ly tra­di­tion that’s stretched across four gen­er­a­tions for Anderson. He first rode a trac­tor when he was six years old. By the age of 14, he was high in the tobac­co barn rafters him­self as he placed plants along tobac­co sticks to be cured in the fall. 

In high school, he’d go on to win rib­bons in coun­ty and region­al tobac­co com­pe­ti­tions through Future Farmers of America. Just this year, he won sev­er­al tobac­co con­tests at the state fair.

Growing up was a time when “every farm had a small acre, small acres” of tobac­co, Anderson said. In 1978, a few years after he grad­u­at­ed from high school, more than 700 of the 962 farms in Clark County grew the crop, accord­ing to fed­er­al data. It was a crop — dark tobac­co tra­di­tion­al­ly grown in Western Kentucky and bur­ley tobac­co grown else­where — that dom­i­nat­ed the state’s farm econ­o­my, bring­ing in on aver­age about a quar­ter of approx­i­mate­ly $3.4 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue for Kentucky farms each year dur­ing the 1990s. 

But Anderson, now 69, also believes change is inevitable. That change has been dra­mat­ic over the rough­ly two decades for the crop he’s grown to know so well. Nearly 60,000 farms grew tobac­co in the 1990s to now less than 1,000 as of 2022, accord­ing to fed­er­al agri­cul­ture cen­sus data. 

By his esti­mate now, there’s less than 10 tobac­co grow­ers left in Clark County. 

“I didn’t fore­see it, the changes that have hap­pened,” Anderson said in his soft-spo­ken voice. “I’ve always heard it said, ‘You may not want to be the first to change, but you don’t want to be the last.’”

Anderson pulled up in his truck next to a tobac­co barn, where one of the last few tobac­co grow­ers in his coun­ty was hav­ing migrant work­ers from Mexico hang the plants in the rafters. Anderson doesn’t grow the crop any­more, but he leas­es his land to 45-year-old Jeremy Jones, who grows it on con­tract for a tobac­co company. 

The labor­ers, hired as sea­son­al labor through H‑2A visas, worked to music as they lift­ed them­selves on the beams high in the barn to do the labor  of “hous­ing” the tobac­co. Over sev­er­al weeks, the air will cure the tobac­co, drain­ing mois­ture from the plant’s stems and wrin­kling the leaf into a dark tan. 

“You see it from start to fin­ish. You’ve touched it. You’ve done it. You know, it’s a sense of pride in the end to know that you’ve start­ed it and com­plet­ed it, and that’s what you do to make your liv­ing,” said Jones, stand­ing inside the barn. 

For the farm­ers who still grow it, there’s a feel­ing of accom­plish­ment with rais­ing the labor-inten­sive crop from a seed as small as a “pin­head.” 

But even as Kentucky agri­cul­ture has moved beyond reliance on the crop, some of those farm­ers also won­der what’s been lost  — com­mu­ni­ty, cul­ture and learned prac­tices and knowl­edge hand­ed down by gen­er­a­tions — as the num­ber of tobac­co farm­ers con­tin­ues to dwin­dle in the state. 

A sea change in Kentucky agriculture

University of Kentucky agri­cul­ture econ­o­mist Will Snell points to mul­ti­ple rea­sons for the dra­mat­ic decline of Kentucky tobac­co, some rea­sons more evi­dent than others. 

Rates of smok­ing and tobac­co con­sump­tion across the coun­try have fall­en dras­ti­cal­ly over the decades, dri­ving down demand for domes­tic tobac­co. The falling rates coin­cide with nation­wide efforts to dis­cour­age smok­ing and tobac­co con­sump­tion, cit­ed by the American Lung Association as a dri­ving rea­son why Kentucky remains among the top states for new cas­es of lung can­cer. Newer prod­ucts with nico­tine — vapes, nico­tine pouch­es — gen­er­al­ly use lit­tle to no nico­tine from Kentucky tobac­co. 

That trend of falling demand for tobac­co, along with com­pe­ti­tion of cheap­er tobac­co grown over­seas, led Congress in 2004 end­ing the fed­er­al price sup­port pro­gram for tobac­co farm­ers that had been in place since the Great Depression. The pro­gram con­trolled how much tobac­co each farmer could grow in an effort to man­age the sup­ply and sell­ing price of the cash crop. Farmers received more than $9 bil­lion in buy­out pay­ments when the pro­gram end­ed; Kentucky received about $2.5 bil­lion in payments.

Snell, who was work­ing at the University of Kentucky at the time of the buy­out, calls the rough­ly 20 years since the buy­out in Kentucky agri­cul­ture to be the largest “struc­tur­al change of any ag econ­o­my of any state.” 

“We’ve lost about 80% of the mar­ket, maybe 90% of the grow­ers,” Snell said about Kentucky tobac­co. He com­pared it to if Illinois lost 80% of their corn pro­duc­tion, or if Wisconsin lost 80% of their dairy production. 

“How in the world would they sur­vive?” Snell said.

But over­all, Snell said Kentucky agri­cul­ture econ­o­my has been able to large­ly rebound from a past reliance on tobacco. 

In the 1990s, accord­ing to fed­er­al data com­piled by Snell, Kentucky’s farm econ­o­my aver­aged about $3.4 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue, with tobac­co mak­ing up about 25% of the rev­enue. Tobacco now accounts for only a lit­tle more than 2% of rev­enue in 2025, accord­ing to a University of Kentucky esti­mate. But agri­cul­ture rev­enue is now up to $8.3 bil­lion, with live­stock — poul­try, cat­tle, hors­es — mak­ing up over 60% of the state’s rev­enue. Cattle farm­ers in Kentucky have grap­pled with their own finan­cial chal­lenges while deal­ing with tar­iffs, com­pe­ti­tion from abroad and the loss of farmland. 

He said diver­si­fi­ca­tion of the agri­cul­tur­al econ­o­my in the wake of the tobac­co buy­out, with help from the state in the form of grants to farm­ers encour­ag­ing diver­si­fi­ca­tion, is a large part of the state’s suc­cess in mov­ing beyond tobacco. 

Republican Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell told the Lantern that var­i­ous boards and efforts, rang­ing from the Kentucky Agricultural Finance Corporation to the Kentucky Agriculture Development Board, have helped with pro­vid­ing farm­ers more options.

Shell also believes there’s still an oppor­tu­ni­ty to sup­port Kentucky’s remain­ing tobac­co farm­ers, one way through stronger tar­iffs against for­eign tobac­co imports, to bol­ster the demand for domes­tic grow­ers. He said even with efforts to tax “out of exis­tence” cig­a­rettes, tobac­co farm­ers still “deserve the same rep­re­sen­ta­tion as every­body else” in the agri­cul­ture community. 

“I think that there is poten­tial, maybe not for growth in the indus­try, but at least for the hem­or­rhag­ing to stop, to where the farm­ers feel like their prof­itabil­i­ty has increased, or they’re able to raise enough to where that they can sus­tain their oper­a­tion,” Shell said. 

But that does not mean every farmer made it through the mas­sive tran­si­tion. Snell said small­er tobac­co farm­ers in Eastern Kentucky couldn’t com­pete by grow­ing small­er plots of tobac­co after the buy­out when com­pet­ing with oth­er farm­ers who could win larg­er con­tracts with tobac­co com­pa­nies to grow more. 

Another orga­ni­za­tion that small tobac­co farm­ers relied on was the Burley Tobacco Growers Coöperative, found­ed in Lexington in 1922. The late writer Wendell Berry, whose father helped co-found the coöper­a­tive, praised the orga­ni­za­tion for mak­ing small to mid-sized tobac­co farms viable by set­ting pro­duc­tion quo­tas for each farmer and sta­ble pric­ing for the crop; Berry argued that sta­bil­i­ty sup­port­ed the larg­er economies of agrar­i­an communities. 

That coöper­a­tive dis­solved in 2020 after strug­gling to find its foot­ing, includ­ing mak­ing a failed invest­ment in grow­ing hemp, fol­low­ing the 2004 buyout. 

Robert Bach, a 80-year-old farmer from Bath County who helps his son raise beef cat­tle, was one of those Eastern Kentucky tobac­co farm­ers. He still keeps a few bur­ley tobac­co plants grow­ing in his back­yard gar­den, even though his wife says they take up too much room. 

“It’s just part of Kentucky his­to­ry. It’s just it’s hard to give his­to­ry up for me any­way,” Bach said.

Bach grew up in Northern Kentucky and moved to Bath County in the late 1970s after serv­ing in the Vietnam War, help­ing his wife’s fam­i­ly grow tobac­co and raise cat­tle.  He said grow­ing bur­ley tobac­co was one of the main ways to make a liv­ing in Bath County; the tobac­co check helped buy Christmas gifts. 

He said tobac­co com­pa­nies are still pro­vid­ing con­tracts to those who can grow larg­er acreage of tobac­co. But for him, he bowed out of the indus­try a few years after the buy­out, keep­ing the tobac­co plants in the gar­den to remind peo­ple of the past.

“We’ve had a cou­ple peo­ple come vis­it us and want­ed to know about what a tobac­co plant looked like because they hadn’t seen any of it. I just take them out to the gar­den,” Bach said. 

Wondering about the last generation

One of those larg­er farm­ers still rais­ing tobac­co on a con­tract wakes up most morn­ings this month to check on his tobac­co barns. But he doesn’t use the air to cure the tobacco. 

Instead, the smoke and heat from smol­der­ing fires inside the barns cure dark tobac­co, a vari­ant of the crop that’s used for cig­ars and chew­ing tobac­co instead of cigarettes. 

Most morn­ings dur­ing the fall, 36-year-old Josh Brashears will wake up ear­ly to check on his tobac­co barns in Trigg County, smoke bil­low­ing out of the top of each roof. He said his fam­i­ly has grown dark tobac­co since the 1860s. His oper­a­tion is called Black Patch Farms, hear­ken­ing back to an era where his part of Western Kentucky was known as the Black Patch region because of its dark tobac­co. 

And he won­ders if he’ll be the last of his fam­i­ly to con­tin­ue to do so on his family’s plot of 140 acres. 

“I thought that I would see, I would be an old man sit­ting on my front porch watch­ing my boys take over the tobac­co side of the indus­try,” Brashears said. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” 

He learned the way of grow­ing and cur­ing dark tobac­co by watch­ing his father ever since he was a small kid, spend­ing vir­tu­al­ly every day out­side with him. 

“I don’t real­ly know how to explain how I learned it. It was just every sin­gle day. I just watched every­thing that he done,” Brashears said.

His wife Kayla Brashears, a farm man­age­ment spe­cial­ist with the University of Kentucky, said all farm­ers have a draw to the land they own, but that’s espe­cial­ly so with tobac­co farm­ers giv­en how phys­i­cal the process it is to grow the crop — set­ting the plants into the ground, chop­ping out the weeds and “top­ping” the plant to encour­age it to grow larger. 

“This is part of our life,” Kayla Brashears, 36, said. “It’s not just a business.” 

When he was a kid, Josh would be able to see tobac­co plants grow­ing all the way from Trigg County to Bowling Green. 

He doesn’t quite know what the future of the crop is, whether there’ll ever be a com­mu­ni­ty sur­round­ing tobac­co like he saw grow­ing up. Whether it was his family’s farm or a neigh­bor who need­ed help with top­ping or chop­ping while he was grow­ing up, he’d be there to help. 

“We all kind of sort of come togeth­er as a com­mu­ni­ty and would help one anoth­er out to make sure that you got your crop in the field and out of the field,” Josh said. “That’s gone.” 

But regard­less of the dis­ap­pear­ance of the crop and all the labor it takes to raise it, he still finds him­self com­ing back to it every year. 

“There’s some point where you’re like, ‘I’m done. I’m done deal­ing with this. I am nev­er doing this again. I’m going to get a town job,” Josh said, refer­ring to jobs that aren’t farm­ing. “Then when­ev­er it’s all over and said and done with, you’re like, ‘You know, that wasn’t too bad.’”

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