As tobacco buyout winds down, former growers learn to adapt

The decade-long tobacco buyout program from the state has allowed some Southern Maryland farmers to switch to different crops or retire from farming. Some others — a handful in Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s counties — hold on, raising a few acres of tobacco, even though the local tobacco auction has been gone for six years.

Maryland farmers who agreed to the buyout’s terms, which included giving up tobacco production while remaining in agricultural production, were paid from a multibillion-dollar restitution fund from six major tobacco product manufacturers to settle lawsuits from the attorneys general of 46 states, including Maryland. The buyout was offered as a way to stop production of tobacco for health and other reasons.

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Tobacco production in 1992 accounted for two-thirds of the total value of all agricultural commodities produced in the region. The leaf provided a mainstay for more than 900 growers until the buyout shifted the culture and economics of a 300-year-old tradition, according to the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission, which was given the task of organizing the buyout locally. It remains in business, promoting farms and new or alternative farming methods and avenues.

A total of 877 farmers took the buyout, about 86 percent of those who were eligible. They were paid $1 a pound based on their average production from 1996, 1997 and 1998.

“Sooner or later, we were going to be put out of the tobacco business,” because of economics and other factors, farmer Steve Walter said. He used some of the buyout money he to expand his produce business into raising bedding plants in greenhouses on his Hughesville farm. So far, the move has worked out for him, Walter said.

About 75 percent of the farmers took the buyout in the first year it was offered, in 2001, and received the last of 10 payments last year, Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Earl F. “Buddy” Hance said. Farmers could sign on over a five-year period, although the vast majority did so during the first or second year.

The commission has helped many farmers make a transition into other types of farming, including growing produce and flowers or opening their farms to visitors through agro-tourism, and is working to promote other aspects of farming.

“People choose to do different things with their finances,” Christine Bergmark, executive director of the commission, said of the money farmers received for taking the tobacco buyout.

At the time the buyout was administered, the average age of farmers who signed on was about 60. Many were preparing to retire within 10 years anyway, so the buyout made perfect sense, Hance said. Farms with younger operators tended to swithc to another crop or a different type of agriculture, he said, adding that many of them have been successful moving into agro-tourism, produce and other endeavors.

Many came from a long history of family farming, Hance said, and “they want to see that continue in the future.”

That ideal of preserving farmland, coupled with the decline in the housing market over the past few years, has, at least for now, precluded mass sell-offs of farms in Southern Maryland, he said.