Farmers pin fortunes on bale-whether crop.

• Position: Cotton - Statistical Data Included

Part of the future of North Carolina farming hangs by a thread -- a cotton thread. A record year closed the gap between the state's second-largest crop, cotton, and its troubled perennial No. 1, tobacco.

In 2000, Tar Heel cotton farmers produced 1.45 million bales, up 71% from the year before and 21% more than the 1926 record. Tobacco production declined 3%, to 423 million pounds, because of reductions in quotas that limit how much farmers grow. Money is another matter. The record cotton crop brought $417 million, up 78% from 1999, still far shy of the $1.1 billion that farmers got for their flue-cured tobacco in 2000, up 41% from 1999.

Even Garysburg cotton farmer David Grant doesn't overrate the crop as the answer to tobacco's uncertain future. "It would probably take a thousand acres of cotton for a man to have the same standard of living he would have on a 50-acre tobacco farm," he says. That's undoubtedly an exaggeration -- others put the ratio at eight acres of cotton per acre of tobacco. But farmers planted more than five times as many acres of cotton as they did tobacco in 2000, and even a record crop brought in just over a third of the revenue tobacco produced.

But while it's hard to minimize what tobacco still means to Tar Heel agriculture, it's equally hard to overlook its decline. Quotas in 2000 were about half what they were three years earlier. Although farmers got $185 million in state and federal aid to help recover from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, N.C. Department of Agriculture spokesman Jim Knight estimates that 200 to 250 farmers quit.

Cotton is attractive to farmers because prices have been stable and because they can grow as much as they want. Production of the crop exploded last year because conditions were perfect. "Almost all areas of the state received adequate rainfall all summer," Grant says. "Then we had a dry harvest season, which enabled us to get the crop out in a timely manner."

Grant, 46, says his family has been growing cotton in Northampton County "since before the war" -- the Civil War. As recently as 1978, cotton production in the state had declined to 42,000 acres, compared with 930,000 acres in 2000, and was concentrated in Scotland and Northampton counties. In the early 1980s came a breakthrough. "We eradicated the boll weevil in North Carolina, which lowered our production costs considerably, like $75 an acre," Grant says. "That made cotton a lot more competitive."

It became even more attractive as...