My Tobacco Role

The summer before my first year of college, I worked for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) office in Lewis County, Kentucky, doing a job that no longer exists. It was back in the days when tobacco allotments were distributed by acreage rather than by pounds, requiring surveyors to measure each plot to be sure that farmers weren’t growing too much. That was my job and I crisscrossed the county that summer of 1966, going up hills and hollows, paying visits on farmers and their burley crops.

It was an interesting job and helped to teach me quite a bit about human nature. All the farmers that summer knew exactly what their allotment size was and most had gone to the trouble to carefully plan their planting. These fields were blissfully trouble-free for the surveyor, with straight rows and squared ends that made my job easy. When I came upon such a tract, I almost always knew that the calculations I made at the end of the job would indicate that the amount of tobacco planted and the allotment allowed were precisely the same.

But there were some fields that were not that way. The rows were less than straight and the ends were uneven. Sometimes the lay of the land dictated such a pattern, but often it seemed that the farmer had just thrown the tobacco plants in the air and let them take root where they landed!

I hated measuring such fields. It was my job to square them up on paper and produce a consistent pattern that would translate into a measurable plot. To be honest, sometimes it required a great deal of imagination to make sense out of such haphazard and careless planting. Invariably, I would find that most of farmers with such fields never had a clue as to whether they were over or under their prescribed allotment allowance.

If they were under in their allotment, they were cheating themselves out of part of their crop and if they were over they would have a second visit from an ASCS employee. I would return (or another surveyor) to see them in an even less enjoyable role, that of the tobacco destroyer.

On this second visit, I was required to oversee their destruction of the excess part of their crop. I hated that phase of the job and, of course, farmers hated to see me return! To add insult to injury, they had to pay a pretty steep fee to ASCS to destroy their own tobacco.

My experience that hot, hazy summer over forty years ago really imitates life, doesn’t it? Some people plan their lives very carefully, knowing what the requirements are and taking great pains to establish the proper boundaries. As a result, the blessings from God flow. Other folks are careless and carefree, not putting much effort or intentionality into their life plan. The end result is that they cheat themselves out of the real joys of life and find themselves unprepared for the final day of reckoning (from PHILosophically Speaking, pages 139-142).