Where there's smoke, there's fare for farms.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: AGRICULTURE

Don't tell Faylene and Richard Whitaker that tobacco farming is fading in North Carolina. Despite a federal buyout of quotas that has reduced production in recent years, they grow about 140 acres of it on their Climax farm--double what they devoted to it two years ago. "We think we've seen the bottom in terms of tobacco production in the state," says Brian Long, an N.C. Department of Agriculture spokesman. "If you look at flue-cured tobacco, we'll see about 330 million pounds this year. That's 20% above 2005."

Tobacco's rebound doesn't signal a return to the past, when thousands of North Carolinians lived off the crop. It's just one way some Tar Heel farmers are hedging their bets in fickle commodities markets. Farmers are price takers, not makers, and one way they can ensure the market doesn't get the best of them is to spread around their money and effort. Besides bright leaf and burley, the Whitakers grow tomatoes and strawberries and run two garden centers. "In the mid-'80s, we started growing tomatoes because tobacco sometimes didn't look so good," she says. "In 1990, we added strawberries. In about 2000, I started growing greenhouse flowers, and then we built our first retail center here on the farm. If tobacco ever left North Carolina, we didn't want to come in on the tail end of trying to find something else."

The Whitaker operation has been aided by the decisions of sons Travis and Shane to return to the farm after college. They're exceptions to the rule. In North Carolina, the average age of a farmer is 56 and rising.

The Whitakers sell their tobacco to Philip Morris, part of New York-based Altria Group. Their flue-cured tobacco is shipped abroad--Japan consumes the vast bulk of Tar Heel tobacco exports--while their burley stays in the United States. Just a few years ago, China was a bogeyman, with farmers fearing they would be smothered by that country's cheap leaf. But the Chinese puff away so furiously they have little left to export, says Blake Brown, an agricultural economist at N.C. State. Zimbabwe, which along with the U.S. and Brazil grows the world's best flue-cured tobacco, was supposed to become a big producer, too. "But it has been falling apart politically, so companies have been moving out of there," Brown says. "A lot of that production got moved to Brazil, but they're moving some back to the U.S., too."

Many Tar Heel farmers, especially those near cities, don't care. They've already planted other crops. Near the...