Tobacco growers used to say that tobacco farming wasn't just a living, but it was also a way of life.

Life has changed for thousands of North Carolina farmers since the tobacco buyout began in 2005, ending the decades-old price-support program and converting the state's most profitable agricultural industry into a free-market enterprise.

Most of those farmers who have stayed in the business have had to roughly double the number of acres they grow to make up for the reduced profit per acre. As a result, tobacco acreage across the state is up, from 151,400 acres in 2004 to 166,000 this year. To increase their acreage, farmers have had to take on greater debt to buy more machinery and buy or rent more land.

Norman Harrell, an extension agent in Wilson County, declared that farmers are happy to be liberated from the restrictions of the old tobacco program, but they feel like they're a little more exposed now, financially. Things are better now than they were in 2004.

Beginning in the 1930s, tobacco was grown under a program that kept prices as high as possible by limiting production. Growers could only plant and sell the amount of tobacco for which they owned or rented quota, but if they grew more, they were penalized.

The system worked well for decades. However, by the 1990s, thousands of quota holders were people who had never grown tobacco or had not done so in years but rented their quota to farmers and then passed down the allotment to their children as a source of future income.

American tobacco use also had dropped off, and though international use was growing, so was international production. Cigarette manufacturers had begun to buy tobacco grown in other countries much more cheaply.

The changes hit hard in Eastern North Carolina, where ideal soil conditions helped make it the largest producer of flue-cured tobacco in the United States.

Under the buyout plan, manufacturers agreed to pay growers and quota-holders for their benefits in the support program, with each participant's share divided into equal payments over 10 years. When the last payment is made in January 2014, it will have cost the companies $10.1 billion.

Production did drop in 2005 and has been gradually rebounding. According to the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, this year, North Carolina is expected to produce 378 million pounds.

Harrell said: "Producers never thought there wouldn't be any more tobacco grown in North Carolina. The general public may have thought that. But the growers understood the business. They know the quality of leaf that we grow, and they know what the markets are. The growers, prior to 2004, were very much anticipating the buyout with the hope that it would free their operations up to grow like they wanted to. In our area, I think it has done exactly what we wanted - or what was anticipated."

What wasn't anticipated was the increase in fuel prices. Besides the gas it takes to run planters and combines, tobacco farmers have to buy fuel to heat their curing barns. It takes five to eight days to cure tobacco in a gas-heated barn at a cost of up to $700 per full barn. On a high-production farm, the barns run nearly nonstop from the time the first leaves are harvested in early July until the tender top leaves come off in October.

There have been some production changes since the buyout. Bigger farms are more mechanized. On some operations, the plants are barely touched by human hands from the time they're seeded in greenhouses, except when workers go into the fields to remove suckers - young shoots - from the stalk, or to snap off flowers that would rob the leaves of nutrients.

Because of changing tastes, growers now wait later and later to crop the leaves, letting them stay on the stalk for as long as possible to achieve a natural yellow or even brown stage of ripeness. It's not the way generations of North Carolina tobacco farmers have done it, but today's grower responds to market demands.