North Carolina Tobacco Growers Experiment With Burley Tobacco

Source from:  PAUL NOWELL Associated Press TRAPHILL, N.C. 08/25/2005

For four generations, Toby Speaks and his family paid the bills by raising flue-cured tobacco, a variety they 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. Finally freed from 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," Speaks, 41, said. For Speaks and the 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 tobacco growers wrestling with market forces for the first time. For some growers in the central and eastern parts of the state, that's led to experiments with burley tobacco. Until this year, about 90 percent of domestically grown burley tobacco has come from farmers in the mountains of Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. "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 of burley tobacco from Kentucky is 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 also growing burley, U.S. tobacco companies want a guaranteed and reliable supply of domestically grown leaf, Brown said. In northwest North Carolina's Wilkes County, where burley hasn't been harvested in a generation, there are 150 acres of burley in the ground this year, said county cooperative extension agent Matt Miller. "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's expected to sell the Richmond, Va.-based cigarette maker. He's one of three North Carolina tobacco growers selected by Philip Morris for a pilot project aimed at finding better ways to raise and harvest burley tobacco, which makes up about a third of the leaf used to make cigarettes. "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." Growers have learned quickly that harvesting burley is a much different task than harvesting 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 and allow it to air dry for a couple of months. That's a big change for the flue-cured growers, who are looking at various ways to protect the tobacco while it cures, said Joanna Radford, a cooperative extension agent in neighboring Surry County. Among them, a mobile curing structure developed at N.C. State that can be transported by tractor right into the field. Others are much less advanced. Radford said some growers have converted old chicken and hog houses, even dairy barns, into curing structures for burley leaf. "I think some of the guys will get out of it, but some others will come in," she said. "Potentially, there is more money in raising burley if they can get all their (curing) structures and other equipment to make it run more efficiently." The focus on technology is also a sign that while the end of the quota system has made tobacco more like a commodity crop than it's been in the past, growing the leaf will remain different than raising the row crops than dominate in the Midwest and the Great Plains. "The main difference is that tobacco is more management intensive," Brown said. "It's more like the specialty vegetable crops than it's like growing a big commodity like corn or soybeans." Enditem