Some small farmers will take their leave.

• Position: AGRICULTURE

If you want to see a small tobacco farm, you'd better take a picture. After what happened in 2004, it might not be long before they exist only in photographs and memories.

The $10.1 billion federal tobacco buyout, passed by Congress in October, will pay about $3.8 billion to quota holders in the Tar Heel State during the next 10 years. It also could shrink the number of tobacco farms. Within the next couple of years, half the 7,850 in the state likely will be gone, says Blake Brown, an economist at N.C. State University.

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About 80% of tobacco farmers already grow leaf under contract to cigarette companies. Without the government buying tobacco, nearly all will. It's easier for companies to contract with a few large growers than with many small ones. Smaller and older quota-holding farmers who have hung on to their fields and tractors awaiting the buyout likely will quit planting tobacco, speeding consolidation.

The buyout ends a program that limited production, propped up prices and made American tobacco uncompetitive with foreign-grown leaf. The amount farmers were allowed to grow has dropped 50% since 1997. Had the quota system remained, farmers probably would have seen a 30% to 35% cut in production limits this year. Without the quota system, tobacco acreage is expected to grow and leaf prices to drop.

Acreage of burley tobacco, typically grown on small farms in the west and Piedmont, likely will shrink because of pressure from residential and commercial development. Tobacco farming could cease in some western counties, where mountains make large-scale farming impractical.

But the acreage of flue-cured tobacco, which made up more than 97% of the state's total tobacco receipts in 2003, is likely to increase on the flat land of Eastern North Carolina, where the growing season is longer and mechanization is easier. "You might see 500-acre tobacco fields" instead of the patches that long had enabled small farmers to survive on price-supported tobacco, says Billy Ray Hall, president of the Raleigh-based North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center.

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Money from the buyout will help more farmers move to niche crops. Growth continued last year in specialty melons, lettuces, blue-berries, strawberries, goat meat, cheeses, fish farming and sweet potatoes. Growers in the state sold $3 million of sprite melons, which weren't produced here three years earlier. About $27 million went to growers of eastern...