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September 17, 2014

Tobacco growers get last checks from U.S.

  • After the checks are cashed, surviving growers will be on their own, forced to find profits in a tremendously competitive global market.
    • By TAMARA LUSH
    Associated Press

    DANVILLE, Va. — Starting next month, America's remaining tobacco growers will be totally exposed to the laws of supply and demand.

    The very last buyout checks, totaling about $916.5 million, go out in October to about 425,000 tobacco farmers and landowners. They're the last holdovers from a price-support and quota system that had guaranteed minimum prices for most of the 20th century, sustaining a way of life that began 400 years ago in Virginia, when the leaf became the chief cash crop of the Jamestown colony.


     
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