Along Tobacco Row, a changed culture

Tony Lee and Billy Massengill grew up with the musky scent of ripened tobacco dabbed on their necks and arms like a pungent "eau de leaf." As kids, they remember sleeping in their fathers' barns amid the curing leaves - a rite of passage in an area where tobacco has dominated the local culture and economy since the 1600s.

Now Mr. Lee and Mr. Massengill, both second-generation farmers, are about to see their lives change forever. The recent decision in Washington to end federal tobacco quotas and subsidies dating back to the Depression will not just transform the lives of individual growers. It will redefine the culture of the nation's Tobacco Row.

Under the legislation passed by Congress last week, cigarettemakers will fund $10 billion in payouts to growers in return for the end of price supports - an attempt to help farmers who've struggled through years of antismoking campaigns and a growing import market. In effect, the measure marks a return to a free-market economy in the broadleaf fields of the South: The government will no longer guarantee a price for tobacco, but it will ensure that farmers get billions to help them survive in a new world of unbridled competition - or, if they choose, to make their way in another profession.

With his farm already heavily mechanized, Mr. Lee might just make it as "leaf" enters the free market for the first time since the 1930s. But Mr. Massengill, with his hand-worked eight-acre farm, will start looking for a job as soon as the spillings are swept from the warehouse. "The little guys won't survive this," he says in a soft drawl. "Unfortunately, I'm one of the little guys."

Through bumper crops and blights, tobacco was the axis on which the South turned since the 1660s, ensuring a good living for small farmers, buttressing a life of gentility for the lords of the plantation class, and funding universities, roads, the birth of one nation, and the rebellion of another.

Under the so-called stabilization program, created in the throes of the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt promised farmers a "floor" price for leaf - as long as the government could set quotas. For 60 years, the program worked as planned. But as smokers' ranks diminished and as new technology made foreign tobacco more palatable, quotas shrank: Since 1997, they've been halved. Farmers, many of whom had come to see the writing on the curing-shed wall, said that for tobacco farming to continue, the quota system had to go.

What they didn't know - and what became the focus of a 10-year lobbying effort - was whether they'd get bought out. After the buyout, tobacco prices will likely drop from $1.85 a pound to $1.45 or less. Some tobacco companies will still depend on American growers: the South's rich soil still grows the best leaf and offers a secure supply. But many say that in years to come, the tobacco industry may look more and more like California's corporate milk farms and Montana's grain conglomerates.

The culture that defined the South for centuries has been dealt blows before, as sure as old farms have become museums and tobacco warehouses have morphed into office space for dotcom start-ups. But many say the current transformation goes beyond being one more step in the march of time - and may instead mark a more substantive end to the era.

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