Host:

When you think of cigars, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Cuba? Business tycoons? Maybe it’s the smell and the image of the smooth, brown perfect tobacco leaf that rolls around the outside of it.

Cigar wrapper tobacco is a specialty crop, traditionally grown in the New England states. Increased consumer demand for cigar products is piquing the interest of North Carolina farmers, many of whom have the infrastructure for growing tobacco from the burley tobacco heyday.

On today’s episode of Farms, Food, and You we take a look at cigar wrapper tobacco as a new and emerging crop in North Carolina. We chat with Matthew Vann, from the NC State Department of Crop and Soil Sciences and discover what he’s doing with the $60,000 grant awarded to the department that will help him develop recommendations on fertilizer rates, curing methodology and enterprise budgets to foster the success of cigar wrapper tobacco.

VANN:

Well, first, thank you for the, the interest in this particular project. I think we’ve come a long way with some of this research and establishing some recommendations over the last few years, but to kind of tell this story, I can’t take all the credit for sure. This has been a team effort. And really, where this seed got planted was in a conversation I had with one of our tobacco supervisors at a research station. So I was with my team at Mountain Research Station in Waynesville. And we were at actually working in some burley research at the time. And in a very, I guess kind of one of those things that happens just by pure fate, the conversation that we were having steered towards cigar wrapper.

So again, we’re standing in research plots that are dedicated to Burley tobacco, which has been the longstanding style of tobacco or type of tobacco that we’ve grown in Western North Carolina. And presently, if you look at the acreage, it has dropped or declined dramatically from the early two thousands to today. We probably grow about 400 to 500 acres of that style of tobacco in North Carolina. So we would be the probably lowest producing state of all the states that grow burley tobacco. So I’m standing again with the tobacco supervisor at the time, Chad Moody, and he says, “With this decline in Burley, and it doesn’t seem like that market is really coming back to Western North Carolina. What about cigar wrapper tobacco?”

And it was one of those things that I’d never really put all of these little independent thoughts together to kind of get that far outside of the box, but here we are, we had somebody who had a vested interest to try to help find a replacement for this burley tobacco that was no longer being produced commercially. And when you look at, again, my opinion, the whole that the loss of burley left in Western North Carolina, there’s not really been this transitional crop to come in and really kind of plug all the holes in the dam, so to speak, across the board. Certainly, I think are some things that have really emerged in certain areas, but it’s not been across the whole mountain range or on those farms. So that was where the conversation got started. So it was really too late to do anything in that particular season.

And I believe that would’ve been probably 2018. Again, we’d already had our research trials laid out and initiated, so it was too late to start anything that year. So I held onto the idea, and then had a conversation with some of my industry colleagues that work within that style of tobacco. And again, just, I think as fate may have it or pure luck, there seemed to be a really big demand for that style of tobacco all of a sudden, and it just seemed that maybe the more traditional places in the US that were producing that tobacco maybe couldn’t meet demand, or they just, again, needed to kind of branch out and perhaps diversify some of their sources. So it really worked out that just a passing conversation and this idea from someone else really started something that has now led to where we are. So it’s been a really nice story. And it’s been a lot of big hurdles to overcome, but I think we’re finally getting there to have a viable new crop for maybe some smaller acreage or smaller stakeholders in this state.

Host:

Burley tobacco farmers may be thinking that the transition to cultivating cigar wrapper tobacco would be seamless. Vann and his research team have discovered that growing cigar wrapper tobacco and ending up with a marketable product is not quite as simple as growing burley tobacco.

VANN:

So when you think about Burley tobacco, one of, well, the primary or the only in use product is going to be for it to be incorporated into a cigarette. And as the name would imply, cigar wrapper tobacco does not go into a cigarette. It would be used in the production of a cigar. So if you think about a cigar, there are three main components to a cigar. You’ve got the filler inside of the cigar, you’ve got a binder leaf that holds that filler together, and then a wrap leaf that goes around the binder. And that’s what you see when you buy a cigar, is that wrapper leaf. It’s got to be perfect, blemish free. It gives a lot of the visual appeal to a cigar, and there are some that believe that it contributes a significant amount of flavor and aroma to the consumer.

So again, to grow the perfect, blemish-free style of leaf, it’s a very intensively grown crop. So there’s a little bit of mechanization that we would use that a burley farmer would be familiar with as far as how we might apply pesticides or utilize tillage equipment. But by and large, our big difference is going to come in sort of how we handle this leaf. So a burley farmer is going to stock cut the entire burley plant at one time, and they’re going to hang it upside down in a barn to air cure. We’re going to do that with this style of tobacco, but we really can’t be haphazard in how we handle that leaf. Again, any kind of blemish or any kind of physical damage or hole is really going to have a negative impact on the final quality assessment for that leaf.

So by and large, you’re going to see a lot of similar practices, except it’s going to be more labor intensive just because of how it has to be handled. And then we’re going to see some different pesticide applications that are a little bit more aggressive to try to keep our insect, disease, and weed pest problems minimized. And then certainly when a grower finishes the curing process and they take the tobacco down out of the barn, instead of just kind of stripping leaves off and sorting them into maybe two to four different piles very quickly, a grower is almost going to look at every single leaf and try to make a quick assessment on what kind of quality and what kind of grade that’s going to go into. And then it’s going to be delivered to a receiving station for commercial sale.

So again, the major difference is going to be in how the plant looks. It’s a dark tobacco. So it’s a very dark green. It’s going to be a lot shorter than Burley. And then again, and how we’re going to provide crop protection inputs, and then we’re going to harvest and handle a little bit of that crop. So there are, again, some very good overlaps, which is why we thought this might be a good transitional crop, but as we’ve learned over the last three or four years, it’s not a one off thing, that it’s a one to one transition. There are some learning curves, and there are some major differences that can be, again, the difference between success and failure.

Host:
While there’s much to learn about growing Cigar Wrapper tobacco, North Carolina growers are primed to make it profitable.

VANN:
So I really believe, and I think that the folks that have worked with this crop in the state now believe that North Carolina’s a great fit because of our history of tobacco production. As you alluded to, we have the infrastructure, we have the knowledge, but we’ve got the North Carolina Ag Research Service and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service here to work hand in hand to test certain inputs in certain ways to grow this crop, to find successes in sustainability and production, and then also, again, the cooperative extension network that can deliver that.

Our climate, I believe is going to be a good climate to grow this style of tobacco. The diversity of maybe our localized production areas as you go from the coastal plain to the mountains, we could find some niche areas to produce this crop, again, where growers have the experience of tobacco production, where they’re not entering into a completely new market. So I think it’s all of these things. The growers are here, we’ve got a good climate for it, we’ve got the infrastructure, we’ve got the knowledge, and then we’ve got NC State University and North Carolina Cooperative Extension that can kind of get us over the hump and share the knowledge that we have.

JULIE:

Currently around 25 to 30 farmers are producing cigar wrapper tobacco in North Carolina. Many are starting with small plots—one to two acres—to test production and become comfortable with the crop.

VANN:

So as I understand it, we’ve got a cluster of growers in the Appalachian Mountain region. We then come out of the mountain range. I would say, the upper Piedmont is going to be kind of the next big hub for production. I have found that we do have a cluster of growers maybe from Rockingham County in the Reedsville area, coming back east to Granville County in the Oxford area. And then there’s a few outline growers that might be east of Oxford or east of Granville County going back towards maybe be Halifax County. But again, I think the largest concentration we have is going to be in that upper Piedmont area of the state, again, probably between Raleigh and Greensboro going back north to the Virginia line.

Yeah. I think for right now, they have a soil system with having these really fine clay soil systems. They’ve got a good system for this production. The growers there, in a lot of cases, are typically a little bit smaller than our tobacco farmers in the Eastern coastal plain. So I think this has been a good fit for them to, again, find a way to diversify their tobacco portfolio, again, because they might be landlocked, because of urbanization or rotational restrictions, again, because that production region is generally a little bit smaller than what we would see in the east. My personal feeling, if we look at historically where this tobacco is grown, and that’s going to be the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts and Connecticut. If you want to compare climate apples to apples, again, the mountain range is where this is going to really find a good fit.

You’ve got heavier soil types. Again, they’re not very sandy, so they can retain a lot of nutrients. You rarely get above 90 degrees at a lot of our research stations in the mountains. So again, it’s just a much less stressful environment compared to Eastern North Carolina, where it seems like 90 degrees is sort of a benchmark for every day. So again, just thinking about the physiology of this plant, I think that the Piedmont and the Western part of the state are probably going to be a little bit more natural fit, but we could certainly produce it in the east. But again, for where we are today, it just seems like there’s been a little bit more aggressive pursuit of growers from private industry in that upper Piedmont area, and then I would say secondarily in the mountains.

Host:

In the next few years, Vann and his team will continue research and hone in on recommendations they can pass along to farmers interested in growing Cigar Wrapper tobacco

VANN:

Yep. So we were very fortunate to receive funding from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services with the New and Emerging Crops program. The grant we were able to be awarded, we’re using funding really for three main causes or three different objectives from that grant. So the first would be establishing some fertilizer recommendation, recommendations for this style of tobacco. And within that, we’re looking at two different nutrients, nitrogen, and potassium. And we’re using the funds for that objective to conduct plant tissue testing, soil testing, all kinds of the things that we can help, again, build a sustainable model for nutrient management. The second objective is to look at using some of our flue cured barns that growers would use to cure flue cured tobacco, using some of those barns and some of the curing programs that we’re familiar with to perhaps cure this cigar tobacco.

As I mentioned before, this is an air cured style of tobacco where you don’t really manipulate the barn conditions, or you certainly don’t manipulate them as much as you do with the flue curing process. So with that, we’re not really addressing barn temperature, we’re not really addressing barn humidity. And that’s, again, something that we would do with flue cured tobacco. So we’ve got Grant Ellington over in biological and agricultural engineering working with us to try to, again, hone in on something as a way to possibly duplicate and reuse some of these flue cured barns. And then the third objective would be a production budget. We’re obviously talking about a very expensive crop to grow. So with that, I think it’s a good idea for us to have some kind of idea for what an input cost per acre might be.

It’s really… When you start talking about cigar tobacco and somebody hears what the commercial value can be, that’s really appealing to a farmer, particularly if they have all this tobacco equipment that they can’t use for other crops, but there’s always the caveat of, if this is my potential for my per acre revenue, what’s my input cost going to be? So we’re trying to really nail that down and get a handle for what that might look like, just so farmers have a good idea from start to finish of what they may be up against.

Host:

Vann is optimistic that Cigar Wrapper tobacco has incredible potential to succeed in North Carolina and should be the next big crop that farmers add into their rotation.

VANN:

I would venture to say that in terms of new and emerging crops, this one is probably as turnkey ready to go as anything that’s come along. We already have tobacco companies that are bonafide businesses that are operating in this state. We have manufacturers in this state. So this is not something that is completely coming out of left field or right field. It’s really, again, just kind of a transition within an already existing industry.

Host:
Thank you for joining us on Farms, Food and You. This podcast is a product of NC State Extension and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University. If you would like to support the show, please share this episode on social media and leave a review on your podcasting app of choice. Let’s talk soon!