Virginia Dark Fired Tobacco Harvest

[Wudman]

Historically, in our area, tobacco was the "cash crop" for these small subsistence farms.  Allotments were controlled by the government through a quota system.  It served to protect the small farmer.  Each farm would have a few acres of allotment and this was the primary source of income.  As Roxie stated, many of the farms produced what they ate.  My Grandparents used to trade butter and eggs for sugar and coffee with the local store.  We had little country stores scattered every few miles and they were the WalMarts of their day.  You could get about anything you needed to survive.  I can remember riding with Granddaddy to the roller mill to have wheat ground for flour. 

Over time, most of these small farms disappeared.  Their tobacco quotas had a cash value and were sold and aggregated by larger farms.  At our height, we were farming about 50 acres of tobacco (and 1500 acres of corn and small grain - along with cattle and hogs.)  40 of that was flue cured used in cigarettes and the remaining in dark fired as shown above.  In 2004, Congress abolished the tobacco program and the small farmer was pretty much toast.  Production (especially flue cured) became concentrated under the larger producers.  Many of these farms have mechanized using mechanical harvesters.  The small guy couldn't afford the capital expenditure.  Tobacco prices have not increased through the years, but input costs have increased substantially.  Reduced margins killed the little guy and concentrated production in larger farms.  The United States used to be number one tobacco producer in the world.  We are now number four behind China, India, and Brazil.  China and India each have north of a billion residents.  About 30% of them smoke, so the worldwide consumption of tobacco continues to increase.  About 14% of the US population smokes tobacco.  Our government is trying to end that......but promoting cannabis.......go figure. :

Wud       

[Wudman]

My son is going to be 12 this week and, despite my best efforts, wouldn't know a day's work if it came out of his phone screened and slapped him.

Im trying so hard to keep gadgets out of my kids hands and this is why.  Boy is a worker but daughter is quite lazy.
Were you around enfield area?  Lots of tobacco up there.

I always said that I didn't  want my kids to have to work like I did growing up........but about the time they hit 15, I decided that working the crap out of them wouldn't have been so bad.   ;D ;D

Wud

[sawguy21]

This is interesting. I remember seeing tobacco fields near my grandparents home in south western Ontario but apparently it is all soybeans now, no money in it at least for Canadian producers. After bucking bales and hauling grain to the mill I went along with my dads idea and stayed in school, farming is a noble vocation but wasn't my thing.

[Ed_K]

 My first job at 13 was tobacco, we chopped weeds till the dew was off then we would sucker, after a few weeks came flower topping so the drips of juice wouldn't eat holes in the leaf. Then came stripping where we pulled 2 leafs off and stacked in a cloth box. the farm I worked on contracted to consolidated cigar company (CCC).I only worked the one yr, decided working at Rita's family dairy farm was more fun  ;D.

[VB-Milling]

In 2004, Congress abolished the tobacco program and the small farmer was pretty much toast.  
Wud      

So would you chalk up your dad's success and weathering the storm to his reputation as a premium grower? Seems like he doesn't plant yearly, correct?

[VB-Milling]

Close Mike!  But no cigar  :D :D :D

West Suffield

we're the same age, and i was raised in ludlow. ive snuck around DOT on 187 and 202 many times.

I always see middle TN near your avatar and forget your a New Englander.  Been through Ludlow many times.  Wonder if we met at one point in the last 40 years :D

[Wudman]

In 2004, Congress abolished the tobacco program and the small farmer was pretty much toast.  
Wud      

So would you chalk up your dad's success and weathering the storm to his reputation as a premium grower? Seems like he doesn't plant yearly, correct?

He plants every year.  It is now more a labor of love than anything else.  The family has been doing it for generations and he has been doing it all his life.  If you looked at it from purely a financial standpoint, it doesn't make sense.  In his case, he has the farm, he has the facilities, he has some time, and it keeps him moving.  With family labor, he makes a little bit.  He did cut his production in half this year as compared to recent years.  He was working himself too hard (and has been dealing with cancer for the last 10 years as well) and not feeling well a good bit of time.  His oncologist said that he responded to his treatment so well due to his physical fitness......so it's a double edged sword.  Working in it keeps him going, but a lifetime in it possibly caused the cancer.

Wud

[beav]

Aah yes, the memories-
Congestive heart failure, lung cancer, pneumonectomy!
I'd kill(or die) for another gritt!

[VB-Milling]

He plants every year.  It is now more a labor of love than anything else.  The family has been doing it for generations and he has been doing it all his life.  If you looked at it from purely a financial standpoint, it doesn't make sense.  In his case, he has the farm, he has the facilities, he has some time, and it keeps him moving.  With family labor, he makes a little bit.  He did cut his production in half this year as compared to recent years.  He was working himself too hard (and has been dealing with cancer for the last 10 years as well) and not feeling well a good bit of time.  His oncologist said that he responded to his treatment so well due to his physical fitness......so it's a double edged sword.  Working in it keeps him going, but a lifetime in it possibly caused the cancer.

Wud

Good for him despite being 81 and all his hardships.  Plenty in the world today would use either one of those as a reason to give up on most, if not all, things.

I wouldn't mind pickin' tobacco some day with you for old time's sake.  8)

[newoodguy78]

The guys around here had it tough with tobacco this year. Such a wet year a lot molded in the field prior to  harvest. 
Just yesterday I saw loads of it going by in manure spreaders apparently what some put up was right on the edge and didn't make it either. 
I know next to nothing about it other than watching the neighbors work theirs. I will say that it is extremely labor intensive, with a lot of inputs. 
I feel bad for them losing their crops.
Great pictures Wudman

[Roxie]

Aah yes, the memories-
Congestive heart failure, lung cancer, pneumonectomy!
I'd kill(or die) for another gritt!

Please bare with us, it was a kinder, gentler and more polite time. Before everything will kill you and you would be judged by the crops you produced. Who knows?  Maybe in the next decade folks will be chastising you for your memories of killing trees.

[SwampDonkey]

Historically, in our area, tobacco was the "cash crop" for these small subsistence farms.  Allotments were controlled by the government through a quota system.  It served to protect the small farmer.  Each farm would have a few acres of allotment and this was the primary source of income.  As Roxie stated, many of the farms produced what they ate.  My Grandparents used to trade butter and eggs for sugar and coffee with the local store.  We had little country stores scattered every few miles and they were the WalMarts of their day.  You could get about anything you needed to survive.  I can remember riding with Granddaddy to the roller mill to have wheat ground for flour.

Over time, most of these small farms disappeared.  Their tobacco quotas had a cash value and were sold and aggregated by larger farms.  At our height, we were farming about 50 acres of tobacco (and 1500 acres of corn and small grain - along with cattle and hogs.)  40 of that was flue cured used in cigarettes and the remaining in dark fired as shown above.  In 2004, Congress abolished the tobacco program and the small farmer was pretty much toast.  Production (especially flue cured) became concentrated under the larger producers.  Many of these farms have mechanized using mechanical harvesters.  The small guy couldn't afford the capital expenditure.  Tobacco prices have not increased through the years, but input costs have increased substantially.  Reduced margins killed the little guy and concentrated production in larger farms.  The United States used to be number one tobacco producer in the world.  We are now number four behind China, India, and Brazil.  China and India each have north of a billion residents.  About 30% of them smoke, so the worldwide consumption of tobacco continues to increase.  About 14% of the US population smokes tobacco.  Our government is trying to end that......but promoting cannabis.......go figure. :

Wud      

You're describing the dairy business and rural New Brunswick and to some degree the potato business. I suspect much the same across the continent. My grandmother made and sold all kinds of butter up until about 1986, and by then the government controlled anything dairy including who and how much. My grandmother was going to have her butter. :D

Interesting story about processing tobacco. Labour intensive for sure. But that's farming, the old fashion way.

[SwampDonkey]

I always said that I didn't  want my kids to have to work like I did growing up........

Wud

Not to be judgmental here, but these are my words I use on anyone giving me those lines. :D ;D That is why with a lot of kids you can't get any work out of them these days. In work I do, most are 40 +. I've seen young fellas last maybe a couple weeks, then the production declines rapidly after that to maybe 2 days, 2 hrs each. :D

When I was in school, vacation was working vacations and lots of other kids were sitting around or actually vacationing someplace, not working. :D Not encouraging kids to work does no good at all. ;)

[Don P]

Growing up there was 7 miles of warehouses around American. The smell of blending tobacco on a warm night smelled good for miles. Michelle's Dad was their mechanical/ maintenance dept engineer. When she got a partial scholarship at State from Phillip Morris we never told him  :D. Their yard and plenty of others were built up with heavy applications of composted floor sweepings, snuff.

I was working in a furniture components shop and someone stopped over there and got some empty fiber drums for scrap barrels beside our saws. When we popped the lids it about took your head off. They had been menthol shipping barrels. We were all clear as a bell for days  :D.

[Tom King]

Tobacco played a larger, formative part in our history than most realize.  It was the reason slave trade grew as large as it did, with Tobacco being an extremely labor intensive crop to produce.

In a not so round about way, it's the reason the main characters we know from our History, from Virginia, like Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were willing to get involved with the Revolution, and why it was successful.  They had such an insurmountable debt, due to a short-sighted, and fairly crazy Monarch, that their only way out was to fight for it.

There are some very good, old books on that part of history, but it's not taught in schools.  Here's a small glimpse:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_in_the_American_colonies

We are what we are today, in no small part because of tobacco.

[gspren]

A few weeks ago we sat on the front porch of our new house and watched the Amish neighbors picking tobacco, the work horse pulling the collection wagon seemed to move forward about 30' and then stop totally with verbal commands, didn't look like the farmer ever touched anything.

[Kas]

Haven't posted much, and haven't posted in a long time.....but man this brings back memories. My Grandpa had a farm in Feeding Hills/Agwam, MA and grew tobacco. As a 6 yr old during harvest, my job was to lay out the slats every six plants while the grownups went along cutting and spearing the plants, and then set on a trailer just like in your pictures. My older brother got to drive the tractor, an old Farmall. We had a barn again just like in your pictures, and my brother and I got to climb up in there and help with hanging the slats on the poles.  Mom was not happy about us "kids" doing the climbing and helping, but dad insisted that we help. I'm glad he did! I was too young to really know anything about the tobacco itself, but they did not use fires to smoke/dry the plants, just swung open alternate panels on the sides of the barn to get air circulation going.

Years later after this, my dad dismantled the barns and brought a lot of the siding wood home with him. He built a shed with some of it, and when you went into the shed you could still faintly smell the tobacco!

The whole process is still a distinct memory for me some 60 years later!

[Don P]

Tom touched on the fortunes and history. I've heard that the little pouch of Bull Durham was the first consumer packaging, prior to that just about everything was bought from bulk at the store. It was in a handy prepackaged consumer sized pouch. Later on the Dukes absorbed Bull Durham, RJR and others and formed American Tobacco. After the Supreme Court forced them to break up, James B Duke took his millions and among other things started Duke University.

Tobacco money and ROTC put my Dad through school. Grandad's boss at the dairy let them work his allotment and keep a share for school money. Growing up, when it was ok to have tobacco as wall decoration in your house, there was a hand of tobacco, neatly tied with a folded leaf, hanging on the wall in the entry of our house. It was an old symbol of peace and welcome.

Probably the first anti smoking campaign, in the early 1600's King James, yup that King James, wrote "A Counterblaste to Tobacco". They were already hooked on the tobacco and the trade.

[mike_belben]

... that the little pouch of Bull Durham ..

i never knew thats what the lyric referred to, thanks don.
The old maid's waitin' for leap year to come
The crooner's just waitin' to sing
The old cow's standin' by the Bull Durham sign
Just awaitin' for the grass to turn green

[btulloh]

Tobacco smells good enough to eat at certain stages. I remember going into the big tobacco warehouses at America Tobacco with my dad when I was young. Rows of hogsheads 4 or five high all filled with tobacco being aged. Smelled great. By 1970 they started using a chemical process to achieve consistent taste in a brand. Before that it was done by careful blending of the naturally aged tobacco by highly skilled humans. BTW - my dad quit smoking completely when the chemists took over. I've always been curious whether health issues from tobacco use increased around that time. 

[SawyerTed]

We grew flue cured/bright leaf. My father-in-law was a tobacco wizard of sorts Those were good times around the field and at the barn.  For us the mid 1990s pretty much did us in.  The profit was no longer there for the small farmer.  We raised 10 or so acres. Used to be we could make money aka it was a cash crop.  It was bitter sweet getting out of the tobacco business. Tobacco money paid many of our bills and if course raised my wife.  The fellowship with neighbors and family was the best part of all of it.

Thanks Wudman for posting this.  Good to see the family is still involved.

[Wudman]

Time to bring this post full circle.  I showed the process of getting tobacco in the barn.  Now, here is the process of getting it out.



 

Here is the tobacco after it has been dried.  It was cured with wood smoke.  The next issue with getting it down during the winter months is moisture content.  You have to wait on a good rain to raise the moisture content enough to be able to handle the tobacco.  Otherwise, you are dealing with snuff.  The process is reversed to get it out of the barn.  Two individuals up in the barn hand it down to a person on the ground.  After drying, you can pass it down two sticks at a time.  It has lost a lot of weight.  Inbound, it is 50 pounds to the stick......Outbound, just a fraction of that.  We place it on a trailer and carry it up to the packing house.  Notice Pop there swinging the maul splitting the remaining wood to take up to the house.  



 

The tobacco has been transported to the packing house.



 

The stick is placed on the "stripping horse" to remove the lower leaves.  This is the low grade from this type of tobacco.  We call them the "primings".  Other names are "sand lugs" or "dirt lugs" (because they tend to be covered in dirt).  The sorting boxes are on the table behind him.



 

After the low grade is removed, the stick is passed over to Mr. Eddie.  The stalks are removed from the stick and the up-stem tobacco is removed from the stalk.  The stalks will be returned to the field and plowed under.  They have a good bit of nutrients tied up in them.  Mr. Eddie is our Senior Technician at 84 years young.  He says that he gets all of the work that he wants, because the young guys don't want to work.



 

That's James at the sorting table.  He is sorting into 3 grades.  Tobacco is sold based on grade.



 

 The tobacco then finds its way into boxes.  Those boxes will end up weighing in the neighborhood of 300 pounds each.  We roll them out on a handtruck and load them on the trailer with a front end loader.  They make their way to the buying station where they are weighed and graded.  You are paid based on contract prices.  I'll have to find a picture of the loaded truck.  Dad was happy with his sale and said he guessed he'd do it another year.  It keeps him moving.  We'll be seeding greenhouses for this year's crop soon........a few more cigars down the road.

Wudman

[newoodguy78]

Great post. Are you just getting the stuff down now? Was so dry around here this year a bunch of the tobacco guys ended up having to steam it in the barns to get it down. Usually the tobacco around is sold from the end of October through November. Very labor intensive process. 

[JD Guy]

Really glad this post thread was continued as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Especially from a "first person account".

Thank You!

[Wudman]

Great post. Are you just getting the stuff down now? Was so dry around here this year a bunch of the tobacco guys ended up having to steam it in the barns to get it down. Usually the tobacco around is sold from the end of October through November. Very labor intensive process.

There was a slight delay in making the post.  The tobacco came down a little before Christmas.  He is normally selling about that time, but this year the sale was delayed until February.......and then the Post Office lost his check.  It's still out there somewhere, but the company did direct deposit his funds when he contacted them. :-\
Wud