The 2004 Tobacco Buyout changed the face of the leaf industry in the U.S. forever, drastically reducing the number of small farms with widely spread “quota” plantings and giving rise to several concentrated areas of significantly larger-scale tobacco fields.

“HELP!” Horticulturist Ron Morse remembers the day nearly 30 years ago when that message, scrawled by a county extension agent on the bottom of a snapshot, arrived at his Virginia Tech University office. The photo showed a mud slide blocking a rural Appalachian farm road. What was left of a cabbage patch planted on a steep sloping field was mired in the mud.