Small tobacco harvest leaves many pondering fate of crop

Friday, March 24, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Gary Smith⁄The Gazette Spectators trail behind buyers bidding on the tobacco crop up for auction at Farmers Warehouse in Hughesville Tuesday, the opening day of the season in which 300,000 pounds were to be sold by Thursday.

That’s why Bryantown farmer Bobby Stahl brought his 10-year-old son, Bobby Stahl III, to Farmers Warehouse in Hughesville. People milled about the long lanes of tobacco in the unheated building, waiting for the auction to begin. The rapid-fire chant of the auctioneer soon echoed off the metal ceilings. Behind the three buyers trailed interested spectators checking the tickets on each bale where the purchase price was marked. Among the first of last summer’s crop to be sold was that of Gideon Stoltzfus. Several of his burdens were marked at $1.80 per pound.

The Amish were out in force to watch opening day prices of the three-day auction. They are among the very few who didn’t take the buyout instituted by then-Gov. Parris Glendening (D) in 1999. Ninety percent of growers — 854, as of last month, according to the Maryland Tobacco Authority — have taken the buyout, taking 43,989 acres out of tobacco production. Only about 150 tobacco farmers remain in the state — about 90 percent of them Amish or Mennonite.

At last year’s auction, 1.4 million pounds was sold for $2 million, or an average of $1.73 a pound.

For centuries, tobacco was a crop that put food on the table of many Maryland families — or allowed the purchase of a brand-new bicycle, in the case of James ‘‘Duck” Duckett, 53, of Brandywine. Duckett’s grandmother gave him 2 acres; from the $479 he earned from his first crop, he spent $49 on a bike.

‘‘I was some kind of happy,” he said.

Duckett was waiting for the sale to begin. He thought of summers he spent helping to harvest. It was hard work, he said, but he used to make a game of seeing how fast he could rack the crop in barns where it would cure. ‘‘I had a good time out there. All that’s gone now.’’

Stahl’s family raised tobacco for about 300 years, until he took the buyout.

‘‘My son said, ‘Why did you take the buyout?’ He doesn’t remember the 100-degree days” toiling in the fields cutting the stalks by hand, his father said smiling.

Standing next to Stahl was Hagner Mister, a Barstow farmer in Calvert County and former Maryland secretary of agriculture from 2001 to 2003. A nonsmoker, as is Stahl, Mister remembers his younger days when ‘‘I smoked it, I chewed it, almost every way you could use it.”

Southern Maryland’s light red leaf is valued by European cigarette manufacturers. This year’s crop is low in nicotine, which is a desirable trait for a product that has been grown since the founding of Maryland in 1634.

But it’s a crop whose labor-intensive cultivation can’t compete with an aging farming community and lack of labor to harvest and strip it. Mister remembers the 1950s, when 53 million pounds was grown one year, dwarfing this year harvest of 300,000 pounds. That’s the smallest harvest since records started being kept in 1866, said Kate Wagner, spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Agriculture.

But that figure is a bit misleading, said David Conrad, an extension regional tobacco specialist with the University of Maryland.

There’s a new neighbor in the field, called burley, another type of tobacco. Conrad estimates upwards of 700,000 pounds of burley was grown last summer in Maryland. But it won’t be found on the warehouse floor. Philip Morris contracts with the growers directly, bypassing the warehouse, which takes a small commission on each sale. Last summer’s burley selling price was $1.59 a pound. Of every 4 acres now grown, one is Maryland tobacco, and three are burley, Conrad said.

The 2005 crop’s chemistry isn’t as good as 2004’s, which he called ‘‘exceptional.” But it is low in alkaloids and nitrogen.

‘‘For the Swiss, they find it acceptable. It makes a light cigarette. It’s not a strong aroma,” Conrad said.

Gilbert ‘‘Buddy” Bowling stood off to one side of the warehouse nursing a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He owns the adjoining Hughesville Warehouse, which for the first time since it opened in 1939 wasn’t selling tobacco because of the low production. Bowling said he had a ‘‘miserable night” sleeping.

‘‘I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I should be opening the warehouse this morning.”