Tobacco season begins
A local farmer, who was scrambling to make up a portion of his income lost when Phillip Morris International announced late last year that it would no longer buy from Lenoir County farmers, has found other sources and is now hard at work transplanting this year’s crop.
B.H. Casey, who grows tobacco with his father Blythe, said last December that he and his father typically sell about a third of their annual crop to Phillip Morris International, whose agents purchased from a number of local farmers at East Carolina Tobacco Contractors in Kinston.
The Caseys have since acquired four contracts — including PMI, which still purchases tobacco at a receiving station in Smithfield — and have increased their acreage by about 25 acres.
“I actually got a bit more contracts so I needed the extra acres,” B.H. Casey said Tuesday, as he and a group of workers transplanted seedlings in a field off Kelly Road. They started transplanting last week.
Casey said the contracts are also with Universal Leaf, the U.S. Tobacco Co-op, and Japan Tobacco International, which took over operations at East Carolina Tobacco Contractors.
“They didn’t pick up entirely where Phillip Morris (International) left off, but they picked up some of the contracts that they left,” Mark Keene, field crops agent with the Lenoir County Cooperative Extension, said of JTI.
According to the company’s website, JTI is one of the world’s largest tobacco firms, covering 11 percent of the international tobacco market.
Keene said area tobacco growers have generally been able to pick up contracts with JTI and other firms.
The wet weather this winter also had an impact on tobacco growers, as it briefly pushed back the planting schedule.
“A good number of people like to set out around the first of April,” said Casey, who typically starts in mid-April. “I’d say it was pushed about a week to 10 days overall from where we normally are.”
Keene expected transplanting will be finished next week. Farmers will spend the next 50 to 60 days managing the crop, spend June on “top and sucker control” and be ready for harvest by early July. The harvest typically ends in late August and early September.
“Basically, we had a good transplant production season in the greenhouse, so we’ve stated off on a good note,” Keene said.
The wet winter weather also created a significant amount of soil moisture, but that has dropped off since the rain ceased. Farmers have been able to turn the dry spell to their advantage, though.
“That’s allowed us to catch up on a lot of field work, but the top of the ground is getting dry,” Casey remarked.
Keene said that, despite the setback from the weather, tobacco growers have been able to catch up and in some cases, get ahead of schedule, thanks to the machines and technology available to farmers these days.
“It doesn’t require the number of people to transplant that it used to,” he explained. “A lot of this equipment now is very mechanized and we just make better time with it.”
Decades ago, seedlings were grown in seedbeds and then transplanted to the field by hand, an operation that would take three people for each plant, according to the Tobacco Farm Life Museum.
Keene said that today’s farmers, using transplanting machines, can plant about 25 acres per day. That was not the case even 30 years ago, though.
“That was (the farmer’s) whole crop, 25 acres,” Keene said. “It’d take him two weeks to get it transplanted and now we can get that set out in one day.”
By David Anderson