Yesterday my folks, my aunt, and I went to Lexington, our nearest larger city for lunch and some shopping. As we were driving, we passed a few farms with nice looking tobacco crops. Sad thing was, even I could remember the day when the entire countryside on that end of town was tobacco. My family has a long history in tobacco, my grandparents were tobacco sharecroppers as were the past generations of my mom's family. Sharecropping means they rented land and raised the crop allotted to the acreage. They received a portion of the money after the tobacco was sold and so did the land owner.
While I was growing up I remember my mom and my aunt both going 'home' to help my grandparents set their tobacco crop. Small tobacco plants were plucked from the loose soil of the tobacco bed and set using a tractor and setting attachment.
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| None of the people pictured in this blog are my family. |
As a kid growing up we had two jobs. One was to help 'pull plants' from the bed so that the setters could set. The other was to follow behind the setter and fix any plants that were accidentally placed in the ground upside down. It was looooong tedious work. My mom and aunt always speak wistfully of setting time now. Setting was a time for socialization (which might have been the reason for all the upside down plants).
For the rest of the spring and a good part of the summer, the crop takes care of itself. It needs weeding, watering if it doesn't rain and once it gets up a bit then you have to pluck the tobacco worms off:
By late summer the crop is taller than most people and begins to flower:
The flowers are broken off , called 'topping' the tobacco, so that the plants resources can focus on growing larger leaves. Once the leaves begin turning yellow its time to start cutting.
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This isn't a very good looking crop.
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| Cutting. |
My dad would sometimes come help during cutting and housing as would the other men of the family. This was the time when my granny would cook holiday size meals to feed the work hands. My mom and aunt would help then too. Keep in mind that cutting and housing usually coincided with canning season...I hate breaking beans and shucking corn to this day...but dang I sure miss those home canned foods!
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Housing.
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Once in the barn, the tobacco hangs suspended for a couple of months to cure. Some places smoke cure tobacco, but not here in central Kentucky.
After the tobacco cures then comes 'into case', a mysterious state I never fully understood but it has something to do w/ the amount of moisture in the leaves, its ready to be stripped from the stalks. Once again this was a family endeavor.
Take a look at the mans fingers in the picture below:
Notice the blackened fingers? I remember everyone's hands being black as tar and sticky when they came out of the stripping room. The kids hauled the stalks out as we couldn't be trusted to pull the right leaves or the right way. Different leaves had different names (again, that knowledge is lost to me) and were different grades. That black junk didn't just end up on hands, by the end of the day the inside of your nose would be black and your boogers would be rock hard and black as coal. Yes, a little graphic but its the truth.
From the stripping room, the tobacco is bound into bales and hauled off to sell:
After that, its bought by various companies and made into cigarettes. Most burley tobacco from Kentucky does not become cigars, a different type of tobacco is needed for that. Most of the country looks upon those big cigarette companies with hate and disgust in their eyes...the new devils that must be driven out. And don't get me wrong, I don't like smoking, its a habit I am thankful I never picked up, I saw the devastation it can cause in my own family. But because I have roots in tobacco, I see a different side to it. I know that the crop was supported thousands of Kentucky families, put food on their tables and clothes on their backs. As tobacco has become an 'evil' crop most families have sold off the family farms, the land here isn't good for raising much else. So now the countryside that used to look like this:
Looks like this:
