Just Some Pictures From My Neck of the Woods

Right down the road from the house. For those who have never seen one, this is a barn full of tobacco. The tobacco is cut by hand, then speared onto sticks that are about 4 feet long. The sticks are then hung from tier poles (just poles that run across the barn from that lowest level you can see, to the top of the barn). The poles are placed about 4 feet apart. Workers climb up onto the poles, on foot on either pole of the section they are filling, and straight above each other to the top. The wagon full of tobacco on sticks is pulled into the barn. The sticks are handed up from the wagon to the first level, then up to the next, and so on, until the top section is filled. That worker comes down, and the process is continued until the barn is full from the top down.

The tobacco will cure like this for a couple of months. This is burley tobacco (the cigarette kind). Nothing artificial used in curing, Mother Nature is allowed to take her sweet ol' time. You can see a little bit of green leaf in the upper left corner. It usually takes until mid-November for it to be ready to be taken down, stripped and sorted, bundled up and sold.

Side view of the barn. These openings are propped open with the same sticks used to hang the tobacco. They are propped open to allow air circulation on days when the air is dry enough. When it rains, they are closed if the tobacco has not finished curing, to prevent mold and mildew. If the crop is cured, they are opened when it rains, or the air has enough humidity, to bring the tobacco "in order". It becomes moist enough to be taken down and transported to the strippin shed without crumbling. You can see 3 full tiers of tobacco and towards the front, a 4th tier is bein used.

Due to the demise of the quota system, this is sight is not near as common around here as it used to be. Most of the small tobacco farmers have quit growin it and the few who still growing are growin larger crops. Alot of the small farmers counted on that mid-November to mid-December tobacco check to make for a good Christmas. Don't know what will take it's place, but one crop that was historically profitable in this area (till the big chemical companies mounted a campaign to make it obsolete after WWII) is hemp. Not the kind ya smoke, the kind ya make fiber from. Of course, federal agencies like the DEA, are too pea-brained to be able to tell the two apart, so they immediately get "up in arms" (or would that be the ATF?) whenever that movement gets any publicity. But that's a whole nother story. Thanks for your attention, and class dismissed for today.