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Going, Going, Gone? / Tobacco Farmers Fear That This Year's Sole Sale of Crop Could Be Maryland's Last

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By JOSHUA PARTLOW

It is probably a bad sign that at the only tobacco auction in Maryland, there are about as many photographers and camera crews as buyers.

It is surely not good that the Hughesville tobacco auction - which used to take 12 weeks when there was 30 million pounds - can be wrapped up in three days now that 300,000 pounds are left for sale.

"Nobody gave a damn about it until it's about dead," said Franklin Wood, 71, in his 66th year as a tobacco farmer in Calvert County.

In the chill morning air this week, as bearded Amish men unloaded bundles of hand-tied tobacco from pickup trucks, most people predicted this was the end of the industry that once defined southern Maryland.

The other tobacco warehouse in Hughesville, owned by Gilbert "Buddy" Bowling Sr., didn't open this spring for the first time in 67 years. Auction houses in Charles and Prince George's counties have long since passed. And it's doubtful whether the last remaining warehouse in Hughesville, about 35 miles southeast of Washington, will be used for a tobacco auction next year.

"I think everybody sees that this is going to be the end. I think everybody's coming out here to see it," said former tobacco farmer Bobby Stahl Jr., 43, who brought his 10-year-old son, Bobby Stahl III, so he might remember how things used to be done.

Stahl took a state-sponsored buyout and now raises 60 head of Angus cattle on 275 acres - when he's not working full time as an administrator at the University of Maryland University College.

"When I was raising tobacco in 1980 ... I was getting $1.80 a pound for tobacco. The price of tobacco is less today than what it was in 1980," Stahl said.

Most buyers at the auction represented foreign companies. The only U.S. cigarette maker still using Maryland tobacco is the Bailey's brand, University of Maryland tobacco specialist Dave Conrad said. Danny Klompmaker, who works at a Swiss company that makes Dannemann cigars and cigarillos, said Maryland tobacco is used as a filler in blended cigars.

"Other countries in the world grow Maryland-style tobacco, and the biggest now is Brazil," Klompmaker said.

The auction's survival depends on whether enough tobacco is grown to fill the orders of the tobacco companies, said Jane Schultz, co- owner of the Farmers Tobacco Auction Warehouse. Whether this is the final year will be decided in coming weeks, she said.

If it is the last auction, farmers said, the remaining Maryland tobacco will be sold on a contract basis with individual companies.

"I'll miss it," said Franklin Wood, who brought 6,500 pounds to auction. "I was born and raised in it. Sold my first crop when I was 5 years old."

INSIGHT

Tobacco farming has declined in Maryland as suburbs engulfed farmland, production cost rose, and a state-sponsored buyout begun in 2000 paid farmers to stop growing the crop.

IN VIRGINIA

Tobacco acreage has been falling in Virginia for decades, and production has dropped because of several factors: lower U.S. smoking rates, competitive pressure on cigarette makers and, most significantly, an exodus of buyers to cheaper foreign markets such as Brazil and Africa.

State tobacco production dropped to about 17,000 acres last year from 2004's harvest of nearly 30,000, according to the state's Farm Service Agency. Virginia grew as much as 242,000 acres in the 1920s.

Many Virginia farmers dropped out of the business in 2005, the first season after the federal government ended its tobacco price- support and supply-control program. That put U.S. tobacco farms into an entirely free market for the first time since the 1930s.

Now, tobacco companies skip traditional auction houses and contract directly with growers.

Tobacco recently was eclipsed by soybeans as Virginia's largest cash crop.

--To read about Virginia farmers adapting to a shifting tobacco landscape, go to TimesDispatch.com and do a site search on the term

"tobacco acreage."

ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO

Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch

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