Tobacco farms are vanishing

As a young reporter in North Carolina and Kentucky in the last century, I wrote a few stories about tobacco farming.

I haven’t paid much attention to tobacco farming since then so I was astonished to read a few days ago that the number of Kentucky farms growing tobacco fell from nearly 60,000 in 1992 to fewer than 1,000 in 2022—a decline of 98 percent.

North Carolina underwent a similar transformation. The number of farms growing tobacco there fell from nearly 18,000 in 1992 to 822 in 2022,, a decline of 95 percent.