We’re back down to 1866 levels. With the Tobacco Transition Payment Program (the tobacco buyout) eliminating the quota system, it’s only going down from here. The idea of tobacco as a Virginia crop probably seems a little foreign to anybody from Albemarle County north, but burley and flue-cured tobacco have long been an economic staple in southwest and southside Virginia, respectively. (Burley growing west of the mountains, flue-cured to the east.) In the 90s, the average Piedmont tobacco farm dedicated 10% of its acreage to tobacco and generated 90% of its income with it.
On a related note, Noah Adams reported on the future of tobacco barns for NPR’s Morning Edition today.
Just goes to show why a certain Congressman should be making real efforts at attracting new industries to the Southern part of a certain District.
Actually, I suspect the idea of tobacco as a Virginia crop is probably better-known to people in Northern Virginia (and elsewhere in the country) than the fact that it isn’t the top crop any more. My wife went to school in New York (state, though with plenty of fellow students from the city), and learned to answer “Washington DC suburbs” when asked where she was from, because if she said “Virginia,” the next question was frequently, “do you live on a plantation?”
Haven’t you heard, Dan? He is going to promote alternative fuels, and alternative sources such as switchgrass to invigorate this district.
Oops! That was the campaign version. Now it will be said that since he doesn’t belong to the majority party, how hard it will be for him to do anything.
That much more reason to vote Democratic in 2008.
Not that he did anything anyway. I’ll take a national coalition of Dems and their economic policies than Virgil Goode anyway.