[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 105 (Wednesday, August 3, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 3, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     TOBACCO SERIES/GROWING SEASON

  Mr. FORD. Mr. President, I take to the Senate floor again to talk 
about tobacco--what it means to my State and every family that earns 
their livelihood from this agricultural product.
  I believe there is one thing every Senator in this body can relate to 
as they work to represent their constituents the best way they know 
how. And that is what is known as a ``way of life.''
  I think if you look around, nearly every Senator could point to a 
cash crop or commodity produced in their State, and tell story after 
story of how important that product is to their State's economy how 
their State's history is tied to that product and how they have worked 
to protect and enhance it.
  But perhaps most stories would revolve around people and community 
and how generation after generation relied on and developed trades 
around these particular commodities.
  From the fishermen along our Nation's coastlines, to the dairy 
farmers in the North and Northwest, the ranchers out West the list goes 
on and on the stories about a ``way of life'' would basically be the 
same.
  But I would like for you to think about something. What if 
communities in your State lost that one defining product that supported 
everything in the community from the local bank to the local grocery 
store? Would that commodity continue to exist as you know it?
  A recent study talked about the meaning of tobacco to Kentucky this 
way:

       Tobacco is, in fact, an essential element in the cycle of 
     Kentucky life, and forms an important thread of continuity 
     with previous generations. While the technology surrounding 
     the tobacco industry has changed, the basic activity has 
     remained fundamentally the same for generations. In the same 
     way that his great-great-grandfather spent his spring 
     preparing plant beds and his winter stripping tobacco, 
     today's tobacco farmer is connected in an intimate and 
     fundamental way to his ancestors as he engages in the same 
     activities, frequently cultivating the same land, and 
     sometimes even using the same barns.

  Tobacco in my State is a way of life.
  When a person picks up the newspaper or turns on the television these 
days and sees anti-tobacco forces doing all they can to wipe tobacco 
off the face of the Earth, they will never see mentioned the 
dedication, sweat, and toil that goes into raising a crop of tobacco.
  Nor will they see stories of college educations for children, 
mortgage payments on a farm, or payments on a new tractor that are 
gained from the sale of the yearly crop.
  In my mind, the planting of tobacco represents the hopes and dreams 
of farmers as they put that plant in the ground with a prayer for 
cooperative weather during the growing season.
  A few weeks after the tobacco was planted, or what we called ``set,'' 
I can remember as a young boy getting up with the sun and making my way 
down row after row of tobacco, chopping out the weeds with a hoe, and 
tending the crop with my family.
  This was part of the rhythm of the growing season, and it was a chore 
that was being replicated all across the State from farm to farm.
  Before long, and with enough rain, the tobacco would be up to around 
shoulder level and begin blooming. And around this time every year, 
farmers would begin the process known as ``topping'' tobacco--breaking 
off the blooms and what were known as ``suckers,'' and spraying the 
plants to get them ready for cutting in the next month or so.
  As with most tobacco tasks, it was ``hands on'' labor and required 
many long hours and all the help you could get. When one farmer in the 
community was through topping their tobacco, you could expect to see 
them coming by to give you a hand. If you got through before another 
neighbor, chances are they would appreciate whatever help you could 
give them.
  That's the way it was then, and that is the way it remains today. It 
is community in the truest sense of the word.
  Today, to make ends meet, 69 percent of all Kentucky tobacco farmers 
have another job off the farm. They are willing to work weekends, 
nights and early mornings just to hold on to something they have known 
all their lives, their family farms.
  They are a community and they are under attack.
  In the same report I quoted earlier, it says, ``Kentucky's social, 
economic and cultural fabric, however, is beginning to show the strain 
from the increasing pressure placed on tobacco by several forces.''
  It is a strain that is being felt because tobacco farmers and the 
industry are being singled out to bear the upfront costs of health care 
reform. As we proceed to this debate, I hope my colleagues will keep 
those words in mind as they vote on proposals that could, in effect, 
eliminate a ``way of life.''
  I ask that Coleman McCarthy's article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                     Voices From the Tobacco Fields

                           (Colman McCarthy)

       Bloomfield, KY.--Much of what persuaded the 3,300 members 
     of the Nelson County Farm Bureau to elect Jeff Eaves their 
     president four years ago can be found in a small sign 
     fronting his tractor shed: ``Pride in Tobacco.'' He has been 
     a successful grower for 20 years, the son, grandson and 
     great-grandson of burley tobacco farmers, all of them 
     cultivating the earth and raising families on knobby farmland 
     about 60 miles south of Louisville.
       Eaves, 38, married and father of two, earns two-thirds of 
     his income from tobacco, with cattle most of the rest. This 
     summer's crop has been in the ground about six weeks: Its 
     broad and soft leaves--a lighter green than corn or squash--
     will eventually be hung in curing barns, graded, auctioned at 
     around $1.80 a pound and end up between the lips of people 
     who enjoy smoking.
       Some 60,000 Kentucky small farmers raise tobacco, 
     generating $800 million in sales and making it the state's 
     cash crop. About 135,000 jobs in Kentucky are tobacco-
     related, with a Philip Morris plant in Louisville producing 
     75 billion cigarettes a year with 3,000 workers on the 
     payroll.
       In this spring and summer's square-off in congressional 
     hearing rooms--where politicians, FDA officials and tobacco 
     company CEOs have wrangled, postured and spieled--the issues 
     are addiction, disease, tax hikes, nicotine levels and 
     regulations. The debate has importance, but so also do the 
     lives of farmers like Jeff Eaves and the futures of such 
     rural communities as Bloomfield, which has one traffic light 
     and its own commonweal.
       The smooth talk and rough exchanges of Washington have 
     omitted Eaves and people like him, as if they have no 
     opinions worth hearing and no culture worth honoring. Do bans 
     on smoking extend to those who suddenly find themselves in 
     the minority?
       On the porch of his farmhouse the other afternoon, Eaves 
     fluctuated from dismay at the increasing attacks on 
     cigarettes to resigned pessimism over where the debate was 
     heading and what it would mean for him and his family. 
     ``Every time you turn on the news,'' he said, ``it's `tobacco 
     is killing you,' and `tobacco is the worst thing in the 
     world.' I don't know what the government's trying to do--get 
     everybody's mind off everything else and focus on tobacco so 
     they don't think about how bad everything else is. God help 
     us when they get rid of tobacco. What's next?''
       A mile or so up Route 458 and beyond two duck ponds, Ted 
     Shields, 63, a retired sheriff and a grower of 20,000 pounds 
     of tobacco a year, had similar views: ``I'm not saying 
     tobacco is good for you, but it does help some people. They 
     relax when they smoke. It settles the nerves. There's some 
     enjoyment there. There's no law saying you have to smoke. 
     It's a choice.''
       Neither Ted Shields, who began growing tobacco nearly two 
     decades before the surgeon general's 1964 report on the 
     dangers of cigarettes, nor Jeff Eaves is a smoker. In that 
     sense, they are anti-tobacco. Their personal and 
     professional lives have different standards. If an 
     inconsistency is present, it's of the same variety found 
     in congressional hearing rooms where some politicians 
     equate cigarettes only with addiction and cancer and 
     rarely hear, much less consider, the voices of rural 
     tobacco men.
       One non-Washington listener is Kentucky's Wendell Berry, 
     the writer, farmer and teacher whose 1993 essay ``The Problem 
     of Tobacco'' asked the country to put cigarettes in context: 
     ``In calling attention to the dangers of one kind of 
     addiction, the tobacco controversy distracts from the much 
     greater danger that we are an addictive society--that our 
     people are rushing from one expensive and dangerous fix to 
     another, from drugs to war to useless merchandise to various 
     commercial thrills, and that our corporate pushers are 
     addicted to our addictions. . . . We ought to be aware of our 
     inconsistency in condemning tobacco and excusing other 
     damaging addictions, some of which are more threatening than 
     tobacco.''
       Such an awareness hasn't been overly displayed in the 
     recent round of congressional hearings. One House member, 
     exhaling outrage, said it would be ``wonderful'' if the 
     tobacco companies were driven out of business. In his 
     contempt for the CEOs at the top, he forgot Jeff Eaves, Ted 
     Shields and others at the bottom. With no way to convert to 
     other crops--poor soil, much lower prices--what are they to 
     do? Just get lost? Sell the farm? Go up in smoke?
       If any anti-smoking crusaders have any non-simplistic 
     answers--and are free of their own addictions to press 
     releases, finger-pointing and moralizing--60,000 Kentucky 
     farmers would like to know.

                          ____________________