Farmers had been suffering financially for several months as tobacco prices fell below the cost of production in 1903. They were subject to conditions so deplorable that "many producers were compelled to sell tobacco at prices which returned them thirty cents a day" in a time when the average income for Southern tobacco farmers was upwards of $3.00. While some farmers speculated that this was due to overproduction of the region's cash-crop, dark-fried tobacco, the vast majority asserted that the real problem rested with the American Tobacco Company. The primary buyers of dark tobacco grown along the Kentucky-Tennessee border were representatives of the ATC and companies financed by the Italian government's tobacco monopoly, the Italian Regie. Representatives of the Planters’ Protection Association charged that these two companies had an agreement not to bid against one another. Agents of the Association gradually infiltrated local trust syndicates in the area between 1904 and 1905, and confirmed these speculations.
