quote:

Originally posted by Al-The Mayor-Bowen

Here in Indiana we still have the option in most restaurants for Smoking-NonSmoking. On the Kentucky side of the river, the Metro-Louisville government is considering a No-Smoking law for restaurants and bars.
One thing I have visually noticed in the surrounding rural areas here are the lower numbers of tobacco fields I see each year. It used to be a common sight for each farmer in this area to have his tobacco patch each year. Now most of those small patchs are full of other crops. The huge tobacco warehouses found in many towns are either shutdown or being converted to other use. I still see some fields here and there, but the number of growers is down by (my guess) 75% or more.

Oops. Anyway, you won’t see the tobacco fields as much, since the federal subsidy the growers have gotten for generations is going away. The tobacco quota allotment has been passed down in families since the 1930’s. I guess it was originally to limit the number of growers or every farmer would want to grow it, and the price of it would suffer. So now the feds are buying out their quota:

The tobacco transition program was authorized by the
Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004 (the Act),
signed by President Bush on Oct. 22, 2004. The program
terminates the New Deal-era tobacco quota program and
establishes a 10-year transitional payment program funded
through assessments of approximately $10 billion on
domestic manufacturers of tobacco products and importers of
foreign tobacco. (From USDA’a website).