Growing up on a Lunenburg County tobacco farm, economic theory was foundational to Dixie Watts Dalton’s family livelihood.
“I learned economics from a very young age because I got to see the value of hard work,” said Dalton. Her parents gave each child a crop of tobacco, and she used a credit account at the local farm supply store to buy inputs.
“When we went to market at the end of the year, I got to see that check with my name on it,” she said.
Those profits helped fund college, launching Dalton toward a career that made her a respected icon of agricultural economics in Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation. She is an associate professor of practice….
