After waiting weeks for wet weather to subside, several tobacco growers in Southside and Southwest Virginia were seeding a special “new generation” of tobacco the old-fashioned way earlier this month.
Research plots were planted by farmers cooperating with Tobio LLC, a farmer-owned tobacco production business under contract to CropTech Corp., a biotech research company in Blacksburg. Once production snafus are ironed out, the plan is to create an entire industry of pharmaceutical tobacco plants, which will be bio-engineered to produce proteins for human vaccines and other medicines.
“I’m very optimistic about it,” said Joe Williams, a Pittsylvania County tobacco farmer. “With the quota cuts that we’ve had in the past several years, this is something that means there’s a good possibility we could remain on the farm.”
Tobio, a grower cooperative, was created by Virginia Farm Bureau Federation to help facilitate the growth of the new biotech industry. Producers must invest their own money in the company in order to reap any future profits from its operations.
With a sweep of his hand that illustrated a lifetime of practice, Williams slowly hand-seeded dozens of plots on his land with the help of CropTech scientists. Because tobacco seeds are as small as the head of a pin, the seeds were mixed with planting fertilizer in a five-gallon plastic jug before being carefully broadcast onto the bright red soil.
It was hot, hard, tedious work on one of the first dry days of the spring planting season, especially when Williams’&Mac226; flue-cured tobacco fields were still waiting to be planted. But Williams said he believes Tobio and the new generation tobacco the grower’s cooperative will raise hold great promise.
“It’s not only good for the producers, or the farmers, but it’s also good for the economic development in the farm community. It will be another source of jobs and income, and in Southside and Southwest Virginia, that’s something that we’re looking for all the time.”
Several cuttings of the research plots will take place this growing season, as researchers determine which varieties do best in which soils and how effective they are at producing the needed proteins. Future plans call for processing facilities to be built across rural Virginia to accept the transgenic tobacco plants as soon as they are harvested and begin the process of extracting the human proteins.
Final production of the medicines would take place in a pharmaceutical plant.