ONE GOOD CHANGE DOWN ON THE FARM

Friday Sep 25, 2009

Cigarette smoking among adolescents is one of the 10 leading health indicators that reflect the major health concerns in the United States. The Center for Disease Control found through a national survey that, although cigarette smoking rates increased among US high school students during most of the 1990s, they have declined significantly since 1997.

When I was a kid, I looked forward to our long family trips from Michigan to Kentucky. My sister, Barbara, and I were a couple of eagle-eyed youngsters. We wanted to be the first to sight a series of the popular Burma Shave billboards. We also looked for the CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO signs that covered the entire back or side of a country barn.

Not until much later would we realize that tobacco products were not only bad for you, but harmful in so many ways. Nearly 300,000 new farms have begun operation since the last census in 2002. And while there¿s no shortage of farms that could use help - only 1 million of the 2.2 million American farms reported positive income from agriculture ¿ I think that it¿s not bad news that over the last decade the number of US tobacco farmers has dropped from 93,500 to 16,234.
The MAIL POUCH barn signs have faded as the years have past, and if I were a kid on a trip today, I would really miss the Burma Shave signs; but I would be whistling and happy over the ABSENCE of the tobacco signs!

Category: Miscellaneous

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