Rural Revolution in East Carolina

Abstract

T OBACCO is the nation's fifth most important cash crop, after corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. In 1976 the crop placed a billion dollars in the pockets of in North Carolina, and half a billion in the pockets of Kentucky farmers; it accounted for approximately half of the total farm income in each state. In that same year the United States exported almost a billion dollars' worth of tobacco leaf and almost half a billion dollars' worth of manufactured tobacco products, mainly through the ports of Norfolk, Virginia, and Wilmington, North Carolina.1 Tobacco has been one of the last major field crops in the United States to be mechanized. Even after World War II, in fact, observers still wondered whether machines could ever perform some of the delicate tasks required in producing the crop.2 Within the past quarter-century, however, the production of flue-cured tobacco (which is concentrated in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia) has become increasingly mechanized, although the mechanization of the crop is still far from complete. Much hand labor still is needed in certain stages of production, and some have adopted the new techniques and equipment less enthusiastically than their neighbors. The mechanization of flue-cured tobacco production, late and spasmodic though it has been, has nevertheless wrought a rural revolution in the producing districts, where the contemporary countryside is an odd blend of the past and the future, reflecting the changes that are taking place. Tens of thousands of tired old cubeshaped flue-cured tobacco barns still dot the land, but they have been superseded by shiny new metal bulk-curing barns. Field layouts have been modified to accommodate the new machines. Farmers have been obliged to cultivate larger acreages in order to use these machines efficiently. The land available for sale or rent has been scattered at ever greater distances from their original farmsteads, and some have succumbed to the temptation to move into nearby towns and become sidewalk farmers when their former farmsteads are no longer central to their farm operations. The traditional techniques of flue-cured tobacco production required large numbers of farm workers, mostly black people, but farm mechanization has not triggered a massive out-migration of displaced farm workers. The availability of a large labor force, emacipated from the land by the new farm machines, has attracted many new factories to the tobacco districts, and eastern North Carolina has made the transition from an agricultural to a mixed economy, a transition to which so many of the lesser-