My grandfather, John Berry, Sr., remembered his father coming home from the sale of his 1906 tobacco crop with nothing to show for a year’s work. He never forgot seeing farmers leave the ...

Nearly 47,000 Kentucky farms were growing tobacco in 1997, according to USDA data. By 2022, that number was less than a thousand — a 98% decrease in 25 years.

It's been 20 years since the tobacco quota, which guaranteed prices for the crop, was outlawed. Since then the number of farms growing tobacco in Kentucky has shrunk by 96%.