Director of the Kentucky Office of Agricultural Policy Brian Lacefield spoke at Thursday’s Rooster Booster about the history of Kentucky’s agriculture especially as it pertains to the diversification of crops.
In the 1990s, Lacefield said that 118 of the 120 counties in Kentucky were growing tobacco. With that amount of farming, the state saw agriculture bring in $3.5 billion dollars, a quarter came solely from tobacco sales.
In 1998, there were 90,000 farms in the state and 54% raised tobacco. Lacefield said a majority were small-scale farm operations in the state that were producing the a majority portion of the money.
Daviess County specifically had 1,042 farms with 569 growing tobacco making $13.6 million in tobacco sales alone.
All the while, there were lawsuits against the state on the grounds of tobacco-related health issues.
As the lawsuits became more prevalent the state started to plan ways to diversify the industry from being so reliant on tobacco crops.
Lacefield reported that in 2017 Daviess County due to diversification, there was a significant drop in tobacco farms. With a total of 919 farms in the county, only 106 farms were growing tobacco.
But those 106 farms still rang in $13.3 million in tobacco sales.
There had been a constant decline in the industry, until 2020 when the pandemic hit.
“Everybody stayed at home so in the middle of a global pandemic impacting respiratory issues everybody smoked more across the nation,” Lacefield said.
Nonetheless, he went on to talk about the partnership of the legislators who have advocated ensuring that farmers across the state and in Daviess County have the financial resources to succeed.
He said that legislators like Senator Matt Castlen and Representative Suzanne Miles and Derek Lewis have been strong proponents of Senate Bill 611 passed in 2000 which established funds to help agriculture.
With their aid in Frankfort, he believes that Kentucky is in a spot to benefit in the future to enable some allocations back to Daviess County and farms in the community.
