Virginia Tech experts try to avert a crisis with research, workshops, and alternatives

Lunenburg County tobacco farmer Albert Watts never heard of paradigm shifts before he attended a Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension Managing for Success workshop last year, but now he's preparing for one.

"It's about changing or being left behind," he says. "In the tobacco industry, the paradigm has shifted. We have to make new plans."

Watts has a greenhouse full of tobacco plants to transplant on his 10-acre allotment, but he's recently invested in other options. Now a bulldozer sits in his shed, ready for the logging-site preparation work Watts does as a side business. Although a 10-acre quota at the new, lower prices a grower gets for tobacco can't compare with the 22 acres Watts grew and sold at the prices of a few years ago, he's not ready to leave tobacco completely.

"Tobacco is my profit maker, even now," Watts says. "It's a tradition too. As far back as I've ever heard, my family grew tobacco. My great granddaddy was an overseer on the Cove plantation that had a big tobacco acreage in Halifax County."

Tobacco takes a hit

For the past few years, tobacco producers and the communities they help to support have been facing uncertain times. Some of the instability has been market driven, with declining consumer demand on the domestic front and increased global competition. Elevated tobacco taxes and rulings on nicotine have dealt blows to the industry. Health concerns have led to class actions and state lawsuits against the cigarette companies. And the national tobacco settlement of 1998, with a goal of reducing smoking, adds yet another level of uncertainty to the future of the industry.

In the past four years, cigarette manufacturers have reduced domestic purchases by 47 percent, causing tobacco quotas--the pre-determined acreage a farmer is allowed to grow--to plummet. The quota cuts mean growers' gross incomes will be about half what they were three years ago; their real incomes may be cut to a third or a quarter of their earlier earnings. That means a tobacco grower with 50 acres and a net income of $45,860 in 1997 can expect a net income of $11,500 for 2000, according to G. L. Jubb Jr., associate director of the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station.

Tech seeks to help farmers

"Producers often feel they have no control over their destinies," says Dixie Watts Reaves, Virginia Tech agricultural economics professor and Albert Watts' daughter. "Farmers can get the best yield and quality, but it doesn't affect how much money they make at the end of the season."

As the state land-grant university, Virginia Tech is trying to help with the dilemma of the tobacco communities through research, advice on alternative crops, counsel to the legislative bodies, and decision-making workshops for producers like the one Albert Watts attended. Sometimes the most significant help consists of making policymakers and the public aware of the extent of the problems tobacco communities are facing.

"In Southside Virginia, tobacco is it," says Virginia Tech University Distinguished Professor of agricultural economics Wayne Purcell, who has made recommendations to the state on the plight of tobacco producers through his role in the Tobacco Communities Project. "Seventy-five to 80 percent of all farm receipts come from tobacco in some counties. If you lose tobacco, you gut whole communities because tobacco is the backbone of the economy."

No real substitute for tobacco

Nevertheless, many believe that the only alternative to tobacco is tobacco. Virginia's No. 1 cash crop is consistently the most profitable crop. According to Jubb, the operating income per acre for flue-cured tobacco in Southside Virginia is $1,212. By comparison, cotton has an operating income per acre of $72 and peanuts $214. Only tobacco has allowed farmers with small acreages to remain profitable.

"No single agricultural or forest commodity or enterprise would have the potential to fully replace the historical impact of tobacco in Southside and Southwest Virginia," Jubb says.

Alternatives considered

Despite the grim prognosis, some families will retain tobacco farming as their cash-generating crop and look for help from Virginia Tech in making operations more efficient. Others will diversify into alternative enterprises, both on and off the farm and seek technical expertise and access to credit. More and more families will realize that someone has to work off the farm, suggesting the importance of a state-level program of economic development and skill development for rural Virginia.

"You can spend money to prepare for change or you can spend money cleaning up afterward--on unemployment, welfare, etc," says Tech professor Purcell.

"The heat is on us to find other things to take up the slack," says Jim Jones, director of Tech's Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center (AREC) in Blackstone. "Everyone is searching for something to replace tobacco; everyone has some success, but when you try to replace a $200-million crop, you have a ways to go."

In March, Jubb issued a paper naming the possible alternatives to tobacco being examined at the Virginia agricultural experiment stations and on the Tech and Virginia State campuses. The list includes hydroponically-grown vegetables, cut flowers, culinary herbs, medicinal plants, and organically produced livestock, fruits, and vegetables, as well as specialty energy crops like rapeseed and sorghum, small fruits, pumpkins, nursery crops, turfgrass, and various livestock operations. A project at the Southern Piedmont Agricultural and Research Station by forestry professor James Burger combines trees with livestock and other crops to realize a greater return per acre. In another promising project, an Eastern Shore researcher is using plastic mulch and multiple crops that he hopes will bring in at least $20,000 an acre on small farms.

At Tech, graduate student Scott Sink (agricultural and applied economics '99) is using a USDA grant to develop innovative production and marketing systems so small farmers in Southside Virginia can create sustainable income opportunities. He and his colleagues are developing a list of possibilities that conform to three core values--community viability, farm profitability, and environmental sustainability. For instance, in some areas, agricultural tourism will be attractive because of its benefits for the community as a whole.

Diversification can ease the strain

Another Tech agricultural economics graduate student, Rushan Halili, working with Wayne Purcell, has developed a tool to evaluate which agricultural enterprises could be profitable in areas of Southside Virginia. The method combines computerized information on soils, slope, flood potential, and temperatures in the ArcView Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with computerized information on the prices, costs, and requirements of 15 different crops.

When the average prices of the past five years for certain seasonal crops were above total costs of production for that crop, a "market window" of profitability was identified. "Vegetables, like tobacco, have a high yield," Halili says. "But they can require irrigation and are usually very labor intensive. In huge quantities, they are not profitable because you glut the market."

The tool can be used to plan an enterprise mix for the whole farm, including the acreage still in tobacco. The average tobacco farmer must now grow at least eight acres of tobacco to be profitable, Halili says. "It looks like specialty crops are not an alternative for tobacco," he says. "But developing a diversified farm plan could help farmers transition to other crops."

Halili's complex analytical software is likely to be used by Extension agents rather than farmers, he says. His prototype was developed for 5,472 acres of Pittsylvania County.

Hudson Reese (animal science '61) and his family, including his wife, Pat (home economic '59), and son, Don (animal science '87), started supplementing their tobacco income with melons, fruit, and pumpkins several years ago. Now, with a farm store and wholesale trade, their fruit and vegetable income actually exceeds that of tobacco. But there have been trade-offs. "We wouldn't be working Sundays and we would have made all the Tech football games if we were still totally in tobacco," Hudson Reese says. "Vegetables require a lot more labor and management."

If the Reeses got out of tobacco farming entirely, they'd have about $100,000 of useless tobacco-growing equipment on their hands. They are looking to buy up other tobacco quotas but keeping up their diversification on the family farm. "We know that change is going to come," Reese says.

Perhaps the brightest spot on the horizon for tobacco farmers is tobacco--transgenic tobacco. Researchers have developed a means of genetically altering tobacco to produce the base ingredients for human pharmaceuticals. Tobacco plants could be factories to produce human enzymes and proteins. "There is the potential that the raw materials for hundreds of medicines could be produced using this technique," Jubb says.

Maintaining tobacco

Some farmers will stay in tobacco because of the investment they've made in tobacco-specific equipment, because of its profitability, because that's what they know. But Extension agents see many leaving and others buying up their land and quotas. In 1982, Virginia had 1,200 tobacco farmers; in 1992, there were only about 600. In Lunenburg County, Watts observes that four big producers are growing 80 percent of the tobacco now. With the profit margin slimming, all producers are interested in quality and efficiency.

Jim Jones, director of Tech's Southern Piedmont AREC, says 75 percent of the research efforts at his facility continue to be on tobacco, and topical meetings can draw as many as 1,500 producers.

Southern Piedmont AREC has been conducting an extensive research program to reduce tobacco's No. 1 carcinogen, tobacco specific nitrosomine or TSNA, in cured tobacco. Only in the last two years have methods to reduce TSNA been discovered.

The way the leaf is cured makes all the difference. TSNA is reduced drastically when nitrous oxide and other products of combustion are prevented from entering the curing area, as they are in curing barns with electric heat and heat exchangers. Extension tobacco agronomist David Reed (entomology '84, M.S., Ph.D.) is working with an industry committee to develop Extension programs for converting flue-cured bulk barns to heat-exchanger technology by 2001, when conversions are expected to be mandatory.

Southern Piedmont AREC also is working with cigarette maker Philip Morris to reduce TSNA in burley tobacco. Burley, which is an air-cured tobacco grown in Southwestern Virginia, requires a slower curing process that is dependent upon weather conditions. This system of curing encourages the growth of TSNA-causing bacteria in the leaves. Reed is also working with growers to reduce natural TSNA in dark tobacco.

Other researchers at the Blackstone facility are attempting to control the tobacco cyst nematode and several serious tobacco diseases, including blackshank, root knot, and black root, by developing plant varieties with resistance to these problems. A graduate student, Jodie Johnson Clarke (crop and environmental sciences '99) has been studying ways to improve production by increasing germination under greenhouse conditions and is developing a computer-image analysis of seed vigor. Some of her work is specifically applicable to the field-seeded transgenic tobacco being grown at Southern Piedmont. Another graduate student, Scott Jerrell (crop and soil environmental sciences '00), is comparing tobacco tillage systems.

Facilitating adjustment to change

As the paradigm shifts, tobacco-producing families are facing tough decisions about their futures. To help them make adjustments and to plan strategically for the long term, Tech Extension experts in agricultural economics and family relations have been taking the Managing for Success workshop to burley and flue-cured tobacco producers in Southside and Southwest Virginia.

"These families are in transition," says Rick Peterson, faculty member in family and human development, who has worked with Kansas farm families during the Farm Crisis. "On a family farm, relationships are important. They need to think where is this business going, as well as where is this family headed. We help them to determine their decision-making styles and to set down goals, objectives, and specific plans.

"Their overriding objective is usually to stay on the farm," says Dixie Reaves. "We encourage them to set specific goals, like seeing a lender about getting capital for a new farm venture. A lot of farmers say this gives them a sense of something they can dothat they still have some control over their lives."

Commercial scale cultivation of pharmaceutical tobacco is possible

In the future, beleagured tobacco farmers in Virginia might be able to continue producing tobacco, not for cigarettes, but for the development of life-saving medicines.

Led by Carole Cramer, Virginia Tech professor of plant pathology and physiology, researchers in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have developed a genetically engineered tobacco that could become a source for numerous hard-to-get human proteins used in pharmaceuticals.

The researchers first produced the human enzyme glucocerebrosidase, which is defective in patients suffering from Gaucher disease. Although it is too early to estimate the cost of using tobacco-produced enzymes to produce the drug to treat this disease, the process should result in a drastic reduction in price, now averaging $300,000 per year for each patient.

The results from research at Tech show that pharmaceutical tobacco can be grown on a commercial scale. Jim Jones, director of Tech's Southern Piedmont Agricultural Research and Extension Center, says field tests increasing the population of tobacco plants from the 6,000 plants per acre of traditional growing practices to as many as 100,000 plants per acre produced encouraging data. The transgenic tobacco was harvested multiple times at points far earlier than tobacco is traditionally harvested.

"We're not looking at growing tobacco the way it's been grown in the past," Jones says. "What we've got is really a new crop." Jones, who has been working with Cramer since 1990, sees a lot of potential in transgenic tobacco and hopes to see small-scale commercial crops as soon as 2002.