Tobacco farms are vanishing

mark.schaver@gmail.com (Mark Schaver) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:34:04 -0400

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.

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