Spiraling costs threaten to extinguish cigar-leaf farms in N.E.'s Tobacco Valley.
Under white tents in the Connecticut River Valley grows one of the most expensive agricultural commodities in the world - shade-grown tobacco used to wrap cigars bearing pricey names like Davidoff, Macanudo, and Montecristo.
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Top-grade leaves can fetch upwards of $60 a pound, a bounty that has helped preserve thousands of acres of farmland in Tobacco Valley - a narrow band of river bottomland that runs from just south of Hartford to as far north as Montague, Mass.
Despite well-documented health concerns about tobacco use, consumption of expensive cigars began to surge in the 1990s, and demand remains high today.
But tobacco is also one of the most expensive crops to produce. Worried farmers say those costs are going up fast, raising concerns that they will not be able to fend off developers' bulldozers much longer.
The energy crisis has sent the price of diesel fuel for their tractors soaring. Propane gas used to help dry the leaves in the long tobacco sheds is way up, and organic fertilizer prices have nearly doubled in a year's time.
Farmers will have to start getting more for their crops, warned Kathi Martin, manager of H.F. Brown Inc., one of Connecticut's oldest tobacco-growing operations, "or we won't be here next year."
Growers are also struggling to find the skilled workers necessary to pick the leaves, which can lose two-thirds of their value if they are torn or bruised.
Steve Jarmoc, a former Connecticut lawmaker who grows tobacco on about 300 acres in Enfield, said growers can no longer count on finding enough local teenagers and people from Hartford and Springfield to work their fields.
"Now it's harder to shake kids out of the woodwork," Jarmoc said on one hot, humid morning this summer. It was well before noon, but his crew was already dripping sweat as men and boys picked a few select leaves from each 7-foot stalk and stacked them carefully on long mats between the dense green rows.
"It's mean and nasty," Jarmoc said of harvesting tobacco. "Some kids like it, some don't."
When shorthanded, the growers hire migrant workers from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Latin America. But hiring immigrants has become increasingly difficult because of the maze of restrictions imposed since 2001.
Growers must pay for transportation and housing for workers from outside the country and are also now legally responsible if they hire someone with false documents.
"It's a lot of paperwork and red tape," Martin said. "It's very costly."
The system of growing Connecticut tobacco under tenting was invented in 1896 to compete with high-quality wrapper tobacco coming out of cloudy, sultry Sumatra.
The shade cloth is designed to cut the sunlight reaching the plants by about 12 percent, and it also traps the heat in like a hothouse.
Jarmoc, whose wife now holds the legislative seat he occupied for 15 years, is a stocky, dark-haired, 46-year-old. Dressed in a polo shirt, khaki shorts, muddy work boots, and a dusty blue baseball cap, he spoke intermittently between taking cellphone calls from workers in other fields.
As Jarmoc helped unload stacks of plastic crates used to haul the bundles of leaves from the fields to the nearby sheds, his 12-year-old son, Owen, hopped down from a tractor to lend a hand.
Some of Jarmoc's skilled foreign workers, such as Nigel Williams of Clarendon, Jamaica, have been coming to Connecticut to pick tobacco for 20 years. Williams, 43, is a tall man with a quick smile and a wife and four children back home. "I come up every year," he said, explaining that the wages are more than he could earn during summers in Jamaica. "I'll stay until most of the season is over," in November.
Martin said H.F. Brown employs about 400 workers each summer, split between fields in the Windsor-Suffield region of Connecticut and farmland in Hadley and Sunderland. Jarmoc has about 200 workers on his farm at the height of the season.
The USDA estimates that 8,000 to 9,000 acres of Connecticut farmland is eaten up each year by housing and industrial development. But very little of that is tobacco land.
"There's so much economic pressure on farms that it's difficult to grow some of the lower-value crops and still keep farming," said James LaMondia, chief scientist and pathobiologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station's Valley Laboratory in Windsor.
"All around us, pasture and apple orchards around our home farm, that's all gone now," said Jarmoc.
Tobacco land isn't completely exempt. Jarmoc said some farmers who once leased fields for tobacco ended up selling to developers when their children left to pursue other, more comfortable ways of making a living.
"People think I'm making tons of money," Jarmoc said wryly. "You're hopefully making some money or breaking even . . . I was here at a little after 5 a.m. today, and I'll be here until dark."
Jarmoc said that, even in the best years, only 6 percent to 8 percent of a farmer's crop might qualify as top-grade tobacco.
And the costs of production keep rising.
Organic fertilizer has gone from $350 a ton to nearly $700, Jarmoc said. Many farmers who used to provide cottonseed, a key fertilizer ingredient, have switched to raising corn to cash in on the ethanol boom, Jarmoc said.
According to LaMondia, approximately 4,200 acres of tobacco were planted last year along the Connecticut River Valley, including about 3,000 acres of broadleaf and 1,200 acres of shade tobacco.
More than two-thirds of the crop comes from Connecticut, but Martin believes the unrelenting encroachment of new housing is making her state less hospitable for tobacco farmers.
"It's very farm friendly" in Massachusetts, she said. "Down here, it's very different. Down here, it's just more urban. They just aren't as patient with tractors on the roads." Enditem
