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market-farming - RE: organic tobacco and small farmers

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  • From: sunnfarm AT netscape.net
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu ("Market Farming")
  • Subject: RE: organic tobacco and small farmers
  • Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 10:55:01 -0400


The tobacco industry in the mid Atlantic area is now almost exclusively in
the hands of the Amish they are the only farmers who did not take the buyout
program.
There has been a difference of opinion about the use of manure in tobacco
production, Lancaster PA growers use dairy manure, Marlboro Maryland area
growers use chemical fertilizer, 6-12-18, its specially mixed to keep
chlorine/ammonia low and sulfur/nitrate high making a better quality tobacco.
Buyers say they can taste and smell the "essence of dairy cow", in Lancaster
tobacco. This could be just a competitive thing between the two type 609
tobacco producing areas.

A lesson for small farmers to be found in tobacco is the importance of
working together, every year at tobacco sales time,you hve tobacco buyers who
would come up from the south or from Europe, Swiss are big buyers of
tobacco,and they would make private deals with farmers and attempt to fix a
local price that favored the buyer as a way to defeat the auction system.
Auctions would put adds in the newspaper telling farmers to join together at
the auction and work for higher prices.

Tobacco is probably one of the best labor intensive family farm crops there
ever was, to bad the stuff is toxic smelly and almost always deadly. The
allotment system made room for small growers. There is an art to producing a
quality leaf and every year competitions are held and awards are given out to
the best leaf growers.

I heard that one $4000 acre of tobacco yields $40000 in government taxes,
this must be the only crop in the world where farms subsidize the government.

I hear that old worn tobacco lathe, the sticks that tobacco is hung on in
drying barns are being turned into pricy walking sticks sold at upscale
shopping centers...Bob.
Sunny Meadow Farm
Bridgeton, NJ.



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  • RE: organic tobacco and small farmers, sunnfarm, 10/21/2002

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