Farmers begin tobacco harvest

“It’s a completely new concept and the jury is still out until we go to market,” said Washington County tobacco farmer Jeff Aiken. “I’m both cautious and excited.”

As the bright leaf tobacco moves from the fields into the barns or curing racks in East Tennessee, farmers are beginning to realize the “huge changes taking place in tobacco growing,” said Carter County Extension Agent Keith Hart.

The allotment and auction system has been traded for the forces of the marketplace.

“The price support system has been replaced by growing on contract with the tobacco companies, but the final price paid for the crop depends on how they grade it,” Hart said.

There could be a wide range in price based on the burley is graded. “It could go from anywhere from 40 or 50 cents a pound to $1.60 a pound, and our contract is within this range,” Aiken said.

Last year’s prices hovered around $2 a pound, so farmers already face cuts of at least 20 percent.

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.

But production is expected to drop about 30 percent in the burley-growing states this year with the end of price supports. Burley production in Tennessee is expected to fall to 32.3 million pounds.

Many older and smaller growers in Tennessee are using the phased buyout of tobacco allotments by the federal government as a way to ease out of the business.

According to Hart, this year’s East Tennessee crop should be excellent in quality, with an almost complete absence of blue mold, even though there was adequate moisture up until recent weeks.

But without the allotment system, nobody knows for sure how much tobacco the farmers are raising, which causes another uncertainty.

At least for a while, Tennessee tobacco farmers will continue to grow the leaf.

“It’s been good to the region,” Aiken said. “And if we lose it, it won’t come back.”