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N.C. Farmers Experiment With Burley Tobacco

Posted on: Thursday, 25 August 2005, 06:00 CDT

TRAPHILL, N.C. - For four generations, Toby Speaks and his family paid the bills by raising flue-cured tobacco, a variety planted because that's what the government said they could grow. But this summer, Speaks is also growing 11 acres of burley tobacco at his family's Wilkes County farm. No longer blocked by the federal quota that dictated how much and what kind of tobacco he could plant, Speaks picked his crops for the same reason as most American farmers.

"I'm willing to give it a chance because there's a possibility it could eventually make me a little money," he said.

For Speaks and thousands of other tobacco growers in North Carolina, the nation's leading tobacco growing state, this is the first year in decades without the quota. Congress approved a $10.1 billion buyout of the Depression-era price support system last year, leaving most growers wrestling with market forces for the first time.

For some growers in central and eastern parts of the state, it led to experiments with burley tobacco. Until this year, about 70 percent of domestically grown burley has come from Kentucky.

"The tobacco companies use burley to enhance the taste of a cigarette," Speaks said. "It's like baking a cake. You need flour and sugar and flavorings to get just the right blend."

The 2005 crop from Kentucky was expected to be the smallest in nearly 80 years, the result of a loss of producers after the buyout and a summer drought. That created a need that farmers elsewhere have rushed to fill, said Blake Brown, who studies the economics of tobacco at North Carolina State University.

"With the buyout, it's now possible to grow tobacco anywhere and whatever kind you want to grow," Brown said. "When the companies found out they could not get the volume of burley they needed from states like Kentucky, they went elsewhere. They also are looking at Mississippi and Illinois and some other states."

And while farmers in Argentina and southern Brazil are growing burley, U.S. tobacco companies want a guaranteed and reliable supply of domestically grown leaf, Brown said.

In North Carolina's Wilkes County, where burley hasn't been harvested in a generation, there are 150 acres of it in the ground this year, county cooperative extension agent Matt Miller said.

"The tobacco companies are concerned that supply is not going to meet the demand," he said. "This is the impetus for encouraging some of them to grow it. It gives them a chance to get their feet wet."

Speaks got involved at the request of Philip Morris USA, which asked him to plant a small plot of burley along with the 80 acres of flue-cured tobacco he expects to sell the Richmond, Va.-based cigarette maker.

"We have been talking to growers all along the fringes of the traditional burley growing area," Philip Morris USA spokesman Bill Phelps said. "We are still contracting with growers."

Harvesting burley is a much different task than flue-cured leaf. While both are grown in about the same way, flue-cured tobacco leaf is cured with hot air. Burley growers harvest the entire stalk of the plant, allowing it to air dry for a few months.

That's a big change for flue-cured growers, who are looking at various ways to protect the tobacco while it air cures, said Joanna Radford, a cooperative extension agent. One idea is to use a mobile curing structure that can be taken via tractor right into the field.

Other methods are less advanced. Radford said some growers have converted old chicken and hog houses, even dairy barns, into curing structures for burley leaf.

The focus on technology indicates that while the quota system's end has made tobacco more like a commodity crop than it has ever been, growing the leaf will remain different from raising row crops that dominate in the Midwest and Great Plains.

"It's more like the specialty vegetable crops than it's like growing a big commodity like corn or soybeans," Brown said.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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