In FERN’s latest story, published with The New Republic, reporter Duncan Murrell makes the case for ending the growing of tobacco in the United States.
“Today,” Murrell writes, “farming tobacco means owning equipment worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars that no one — or very few — will ever want to buy from you. It means knowing when to spray and fertilize, when to crop, how to put up leaves in the barns, and how to control those barns so you don’t ruin everything the week the leaves are curing — knowledge that would be useless on another crop. It means dealing with several companies at once, all of which want a different style of tobacco from you but won’t tell you how much they’re going to pay until you’re done and the leaves are harvested. It’s loading your trucks and taking your leaf to weigh, hearing the company buyer grade your tobacco lower than is fair or right, and walking away with a price that might put you in debt.”