High-Tech Device Brings Buyers Back to Weston

Source from:  By BILL GRAHAM The Kansas City Star 11/30/2006

Late November was once among Weston's most festive seasons, because for generations that's when the city's tobacco auction markets opened and fresh money rolled in. Modernization closed the markets six years ago. Farmers instead raised tobacco under contract and shipped it to Kentucky for processing and payment, which often took weeks. But Monday, a touch of the old festivities returned thanks to cyber-age technology parked inside the New Deal Tobacco Warehouse. Francis Dovel, 57, of Dearborn watched his tobacco go into a tractor-trailer equipped with computerized equipment that weighed the bales, tested the leaf for moisture content and cut him a check in payment. All while he got to discuss crop quality and pricing with a buyer. "The atmosphere is gone," Dovel said. "But at least you're bringing tobacco in here and talking to the people who are buying it." In past decades, auctioneers and buyers walked past pallets of tobacco in warehouses on opening day. Hundreds of farmers and townsfolk watched to check prices and profits. Tourists came to see the only tobacco market west of the Mississippi River. Service clubs conducted chili feeds on Main Street. Then modernization caught up with an industry that, until 25 years ago, sold tobacco leaves in hand-tied bundles that were packed in large wooden "hogshead" barrels for shipment to cigarette makers. Tobacco sold in small bales by the 1990s. By 2000, most burley was grown under contract and shipped by truck to tobacco companies to close sales, said Louis Smither, a tobacco grower and New Deal co-owner. Shipping cost growers 4 cents or more per pound in profit, for a crop that is currently averaging a sale price of $1.55 per pound. This fall, though, cigarette maker Philip Morris USA came back to Weston. The company sent a "mobile receiving station" that is a pilot program to encourage and support Missouri and Wisconsin tobacco growers, said Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Philip Morris. The trailer has fold-out conveyors and an office. A scale weighs the tobacco while a microwave system takes a moisture reading. Buyers grade the tobacco quality. At the same time, computers communicate with Philip Morris headquarters in Virginia, and a printer spits out a payment check. "The farmer gets to stand beside the grader and talk about its worth," Smither said, "and it's easier for the seller to reject the bid price, which they can do under their contracts." Weston area farmers will produce about 2.3 million pounds of tobacco this year, Smither said, a $3.7 million boost to the local economy. But they're far from the nation's Southeastern burley belt, where most tobacco is produced. The mobile receiving station may be what keeps tobacco farming viable in the Kansas City area. "My opinion is," Smither said, "this will probably save it." Enditem