Burley Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century by Ann K. Ferrell

Political and economic restructuring has roiled the Tobacco South in the last two decades. In 1998, the largest American tobacco manufacturers agreed to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars to repay states for the care of indigent smokers, fund anti-smoking initiatives, and provide money for farmers to transition from tobacco to other crops. In 2004, the federal government ended the federal tobacco program that had since the 1930s rewarded farmers for limiting the amount of tobacco they sold by offering guaranteed minimum prices. At the same time, the auction system of selling tobacco disappeared in favor of contracting directly with manufacturers at the beginning of the season. In response to these initiatives, thousands of tobacco farmers gave up the crop and even farming entirely. Those who have continued to farm have expanded their tobacco acreages while giving more control over their crops to the companies to which they sell.

The breakneck speed at which change has come in the Tobacco South has sent scholars scrambling to explain its meanings. Ann K. Ferrell’s beautiful new book on the changing culture of tobacco farming in Kentucky’s Burley Belt is among the best of this recent wave of scholarship. Written in a way that is accessible to numerous audiences, the book digs out the various meanings of the changing tobacco economy for those involved in it. With close attention to detail and employing a strong, but not overwhelming analytical framework, Ferrell reveals much about a part of the rural South that has often been obscured by a mixture of defensiveness and nostalgia.

After a tight opening chapter that explains her method and sets out a brief history of burley tobacco agriculture in central Kentucky, Ferrell takes a three-pronged approach to exploring the cultural ramifications of the changes of the past twenty years. In the first section, she explores the work routines that are central to tobacco’s seasons. Drawn largely from fieldwork conducted on a number of farms and interviews with even more farmers, their families, and various others connected to the burley tobacco economy, the section effectively reveals the centrality of work and skill to the culture of tobacco farming. Weaving past and present effectively, Ferrell shows how change does not move along a simple vector in the rural parts, but curves as farmers themselves adjust to it. Her willingness to allow farmers to explain their world without requiring them to fit any predesigned models and her decision to include voices other than those of the (mostly) male farmers who owned the farms where she worked (especially those of Latino farmworkers), makes this section of great value to anyone trying to understand the human dimensions of agricultural change in the rural South.

In the second section, Ferrell moves her attention from the work of farming tobacco to the rhetoric of representing tobacco. Noticing that the Kentucky Department of Agriculture (KDA) distanced itself from tobacco by not displaying images of tobacco in its offices (despite its continued economic importance), Ferrell explores the history of the Commonwealth’s support for tobacco farming by examining more than seventy years’ worth of the KDA’s newsletters. Taking this long view, she documents how government’s relationship with tobacco shifted over time from celebration in the years before the surgeon general’s 1964 report linking smoking and disease to defensiveness in smoking wars of the 1970s and 1980s to nostalgia since the 1990s. Her close reading of this official organ reveals that Kentucky’s tobacco culture was not simply an organic development of farming and selling (and even manufacturing) the crop, but a result, in part, of the development of a public rhetoric that posited the crop in terms that responded to changes in the political landscape. Once a celebrated crop, tobacco is now largely depicted as something from the past, its production, and its producers, largely ignored by the Commonwealth’s agricultural leaders.

The ramifications for this status change is what...