Stakes harder to find as tobacco culture fades

A friend who lives over on the eastern edge of Central Kentucky alerted me recently to yet another piece of the Kentucky farm scene that is passing away, going the way of the draft horse.

He was staking his tomatoes and realized he's about out of tobacco sticks and doesn't know where to find any more. As he observed, almost every Kentucky farm, at least in his part of the state and in most other regions of the Commonwealth, always had a stack of tobacco sticks lying around.

As he indicates, they had uses far more varied than merely being used to hold the curing stalks of tobacco as they hung in the tall barns. Tobacco sticks made a handy walking stick when one was needed, and I imagine one would be hard pressed to find any young farm boy that hasn't hefted one as a make-believe gun or engaged in a "sword fight" with them.

They were a quintessential element of Kentucky's tobacco culture.

Tobacco was the sustainer of the small farms all across the state, but especially in the foothills of the mountains and on the Cumberland Plateau where fields were often too small and too steep for production of corn or other crops on the scale of Western Kentucky farmers.

But like the farm horse, the tobacco culture where the farmer who eked a living from a 100-acre farm and depended on income from an acre of tobacco to pay the taxes and provide Christmas cash, will soon be but a distant memory.

The "buyout," where the small growers exchanged their government-issued quotas and their right to sell their leaf for a one-time cash payment, changed all that. Tobacco is still grown in Kentucky, but except for the growers of dark tobacco in Western Kentucky's Black Patch, production has taken on an almost industrial feel with fields of 100 acres or more spread across the Bluegrass region and found sometimes in the Pennyrile and Purchase.

Burley is grown under contracts that replace the old quotas. No longer are stacks of neatly tied hands of leaf hauled in the late fall to auction houses in Owensboro, Maysville, Lexington and other farm communities.

The upshot of the change, as my friend noted, is that we can now add tobacco sticks to a growing list of things no longer found on Kentucky farms — things such as cows, hogs, chickens and even farmers who till their own land.