Some tobacco farmers still producing

As tobacco farmers take tobacco bales from barns to warehouses, some wonder if their main cash crop is disappearing in front of them.

The number of farms growing tobacco in Rowan County has dropped nearly 80 percent since the enactment of the Tobacco Transition Payment Program (the “tobacco buyout”).

“There are about 20 to 30 individual growers in Rowan County now,” said Bob Marsh, Rowan County extension agent for agriculture and natural resources. “At one time there were nearly 100.”

In 2005, President George W. Bush approved the Tobacco Transition Payment Program, eliminating regulations on the size and location of tobacco farms, crop quotas and the loan programs.

Instead, the act started the 10-year, $10 billion direct subsidy payments to farmers based on the amount of tobacco they had grown in the years before the buyout as a way to transition farmers away from growing tobacco.

The $10 billion spent on direct payments is being paid by the manufacturers and importers of tobacco products as part of a health-based court settlement.

In 2014, tobacco farmers will receive their last subsidy payment ending all assistance from the government.

Tobacco farming is a year-round, labor-intensive, multi-phase process that has remained relatively unchanged for more than 200 years in Kentucky.

According to the University of Kentucky extension web site, plants are started in greenhouses or cold frames for 6 to 12 weeks.

The plants are then “set” in cultivated fields with a setter, a manned piece of equipment attached to the back of a tractor.

Workers sit on the setter and feed plants into a rotating device with clamps that place the plant in the ground.

The “sets” are maintained over several months of growing (it takes 70 – 130 days for maturity), by “topping” the blooms and fertilizing.

Chemical applications are used as tobacco leaves are very susceptible to many diseases.

The plants are harvested in late August, (approximately 70-130 days later), by manually cutting the stalk very low to the ground with a hatchet-like knife, then stabbing the stalks on a usually handcut tobacco “stick”.

The sticks carrying six or more stalks and weighing about 100-125 pounds each are loaded into wagons and brought to the curing barns.

Each stick is handed upward to a worker balancing on rough-sawn 3x4 inch boards, sometimes 30 feet in the air.

The curing process brings a series of chemical and physical changes while drying. Wilting, yellowing, browning and drying requires about six to eight weeks.

Optimum conditions occur at 60-90 degrees with a relative humidity of 70-75 percent. This is manipulated through ventilation; usually by opening and closing barn doors or vents.

The sticks are taken down in the reverse process, and leaves are stripped from their stalk and sorted into groups by grade. The leaves are then loaded into a tobacco press and compressed into bales.

Most bales in Rowan County are sold through pre-determined contracts to R.J. Reynolds or Phillip Morris, according to Marsh, in the one remaining tobacco warehouse being used on US 60 East.

Tobacco, according to the USDA, is ranked eighth in highest valued field crops in the United States, behind corn, soybeans, hay wheat, cotton, potatoes and rice.

In 2010, Kentucky still ranked second in the amount of tobacco produced in the U.S.; harvesting 85,200 acres and obtaining 181.7 million pounds of tobacco.

As tobacco farms have diminished in Rowan County, the few remaining growers have held onto a crop that supported generations of families, many on farms that no longer exist.