10/15/02

By MARK POWELL

Richard Davidson expects he’ll be hauling a tractor-trailer load of tobacco over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge next spring. After a lifetime of producing chickens and grain on his Worcester County, Md., farm, Davidson thought he’d try tobacco this year.
“I put in 7 and a half acres,” Davidson says in a voice accented with the culture of Bishopville, a small Eastern Shore town snug against the border with Delaware.
Last week he and “six or eight” Hispanic workers were busy harvesting a towering crop of Maryland type 601 tobacco, the oh-so-green leaves heavy with moisture and healthier by a measure than the drought-stricken corn and soybeans he grows on 800 acres.
“I bought the plants from an Amish guy over in St. Mary’s County,” Davidson said. He got the idea to grow the tobacco after reading an article in The Delmarva Farmer about the Amish who make up a good segment of the Southern Maryland farmers who did not take a state buyout of tobacco producers. It was just one of those things — he thought he’d tried his hand at raising the golden leaf that is a part of the culture of those counties south and east of Washington, D.C.
Right after he planted the thousands of tiny tobacco plants he’d bought from John Stoltzfus in early June, he got just enough rain to get them going. Then timely rains in August nourished them.
David Conrad, University of Maryland Cooperative Extension tobacco agent, said Davidson will get more poundage from his crop than half of the more experienced tobacco producers in Southern Maryland. The rain really helped him.
“And it’s a nice mellow soil,” Conrad said of the field that’s a fair drive from the chicken houses in which he’s hanging the tobacco.
It’s these not-the-normal curing barns that are drawing the attention of the curious.
Warehousemen and Amish producers are paying attention to how it’s working out.
“I don’t know of anyone who’s cured tobacco in a chicken house,” Conrad said. Davidson doesn’t know of anybody else, either.
It’s just not the normal course of things in agriculture.
Tobacco farmers grow tobacco.
Chicken farmers produce chicken.
And, the two cultures seldom meet.
The buyers for the tobacco are in Southern Maryland. Tobacco barns are old, old structures. They’re tall and built to withstand the weight of the freshly harvested tobacco.
A poultry house is a different structure.
Davidson’s poultry houses were used for broilers and roasters grown for Salisbury-based Perdue Farms. In fact, the last flock went out just six weeks ago. His two chickens houses are 60 years old, beyond their prime for efficiently producing poultry. Unlike the tobacco barns in Southern Maryland, they are low to the ground.
But, they smell like tobacco now. The intense ammonia smell normally associated with chicken houses has dissipated, almost entirely.
“We reinforced the beams with 2 by 4s and 2 by 6s,” Davidson said.
Davidson strung steel aircraft cable the length of the two tobacco houses to provide perches from which to hang the sticks of tobacco. The sticks — some of which are now being turned into walking canes and sold in Southern Maryland antique shops — are used to hold stalks of tobacco plants. Those stalks are then hung upside down to cure, in an almost magical process that removes moisture and, ideally, puts moisture back, through air contact to produce a velvety soft leaf.
“Those sticks of tobacco are heavy,” Davidson said.
When they’re green they are.
Conrad estimated that Davidson could get about 4,900 sticks of tobacco hung in his chicken houses. When the tobacco is freshly harvested, a stick of tobacco weighs about 25 pounds. That would mean that Davidson’s chicken houses are holding, temporarily, more than 122,000 pounds of tobacco.
The leaves rapidly lose weight as moisture evaporates. That 25 pound stick of tobacco will quickly get down to something less than 10 pounds.
“There’s a lot of air movement in those chicken houses,” Conrad said. In fact, there may be too much air movement, drying them out too fast.
“Tobacco farmers more often dry out tobacco too quickly than keep it too moist,” Conrad said.
In this experimental year, Davidson is learning all kinds of things about tobacco production. And, the fact he’s curing it in chicken houses, a first, means he’ll know more about that aspect than anyone else when he bales it for shipment to one of the warehouses — either in Upper Marlboro or Hughesville.
“It’s not a game,” he said, adding that he hopes to make a decent amount of money out of the venture.
It’s not an easy path for an Eastern Shore farmer. His equipment is all set up for grain production — big grain trucks instead of the lower-to-the-ground wagons used on most tobacco farms in Southern Maryland.
“When the plant says do something, you have to do it,” Conrad said.
That may sound mystical, but it’s reality.
Tobacco plants need attention. Suckers have to be controlled. Nitrogen application rates have to be just right.
And then there’s harvest time.
All those tobacco plants can look like a jungle of green, Conrad said. Workers have to be encouraged to know that several acres of tobacco can be harvested in an orderly manner. It takes a certain amount of psychology to help laborers get through it.
When you grow up around tobacco farming, all these details get learned over a lifetime.
Davidson is learning it all at once.
And, he’s got a crop for it. Worcester County Extension agent Laura Romaneo, a transplant from Massachusetts where she saw cigar wrapper tobacco being grown, is learning along with Davidson.
Conrad, whose worked with Davidson throughout this year, said he is available to help Eastern Shore farmers who might want to try out tobacco production.
First they should contact their local Extension agent, he suggested.
While Davidson is the only farmer growing tobacco on the Lower and Mid-Shore areas, there are 13 Cecil County farmers — mostly Amish and Mennonite — on Conrad’s mailing list for the reports he prepares on tobacco production.
Conrad estimates there remain more than 200 tobacco farmers in the state after the buyout took 655 out of the business.
This year, Conrad said, those farms will have a crop of between 2.6 and 3 million pounds. Maryland Agricultural Statistics Service estimates it will be 2.4 million pounds.
In any case, the major buyers are expected to attend the sales in Maryland. Conrad said he has received letters of interest from European buyers, usually the top-dollar purchasers of Maryland tobacco.