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Chapter 3. Taking Tobacco to Market
- The University Press of Kentucky
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99 Chapter 3 Taking Tobacco to Market The auction system developed and evolved over the centuries but was basically in place by the early twentieth century. Throughout the century, the opening of the market season was an important event marked by local festivals and widely covered by the media. For instance, in 1939 the opening of the markets in Lexington, for many years the largest burley marketing center, included “a parade, the crowning of a movie star as queen, a carnival, and French follies.”1 Year after year, a similar photograph was taken and published to commemorate the opening of sales: men in trench coats and fedora hats lined up on both sides of a row of piles of tobacco, in the midst of the first day of sales. The photo usually included the warehouseman , the auctioneer, the ticket marker, eight to ten buyers, and often a political figure such as the commissioner of agriculture or the governor , showing his support of Kentucky’s largest cash crop through his presence on opening day. The sound of the chant of the tobacco auctioneer has become an iconic American sound—in part through radio advertisements such as the American Tobacco Company’s, which featured the auction chant ending with “Sold American!”— and it became a focal point of nostalgia when tobacco warehouses closed their doors. R. J. Reynolds began to sponsor tobacco auctioneer contests in the 1980s. The marketing of tobacco has of course changed significantly since the 2004 buyout, which brought with it the end of the tobacco auction. Beginning with Philip Morris’s “Partnering” program in 2000, many farmers had in fact begun to contract directly with companies before the buyout. The advantage of direct contracting for farmers was that they saved the fees that were paid to the warehouse , netting them several cents a pound—a particularly attractive gain as they were coping with the loss of quota. This turn of events 100 The Burley ToBAcco crop yeAr, Then And now was controversial, however, as many growers and others on the production side feared the threat that it posed to the future of the tobacco program and to tobacco warehouses and those employed by them. Others accepted it as the next phase of tobacco production and gladly sold their tobacco without paying warehouse fees. Interviews conducted with growers and agricultural professionals as late as 2002 for the Kentucky Oral History Commission include strong statements of support for the continuation of the program. Rod Keugel , a tobacco grower and a former president and longtime board member of the Burley Co-op, said in an interview in 2001: The effort to destroy the tobacco program, is just unbelievable to me, I cannot believe that farmers, are willing for ten cents a pound, to contract knowing surely they know, there’s an ulterior motive to what the companies are doing and, some of the younger ones out here, I guess I would include myself in the younger generation of farmers since our average age is about sixty, think that “because I raise good tobacco that the company’ll be good to me and take care of me.” And maybe— I hope they’re right, but I don’t think they are. It’s never been true before. Despite the uncertainty, by the time of the buyout tobacco growers generally welcomed it for a number of reasons. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that everyone involved on the production side (meaning everyone but the companies and perhaps some in the political arena) “welcomed” it primarily because, by 2004, a buyout seemed to be the only way to continue to raise tobacco with any profit at all. The quota reductions in the years leading up to the buyout were so severe that one farmer described his experience this way: “They knew what they were doing, they cut us, they kept cutting us for three years, down—I think from fifty thousand [pounds] they cut me to ten thousand. Then they said ‘Well now this year we’re gonna buy out.’ So I got sixty or seventy thousand [dollars], and if they had had it when they should have—started talking about it, I would have had four hundred thousand [dollars]. Now that’s a big—that’s a big big difference.” Many growers, like this one, feel that the timing of the massive quota cuts in the years just prior to the buyout was intentionally planned to benefit the companies—particularly since...