Last burley I raised was the prettiest I ever seen. $1.42 lb. nasty half rotten stuff brought $1.70. I got out.
$2.50 a pound for fire cured is cheap . I have not priced any for a couple of years and I have to pick up two boxes of wrapper grade latter this week but their price is $1 higher. I would have grown some last year but thing I could not control came up and I was not able to grow dark air and fire some of it.
I heard most burley was hitting the $2.00 mark because there is a burley shortage. But that is how they do it , pay good money one year to rob you the next. Was your contracted to RJ ?
So I grew up raising burley. I’m pretty sure I know what dark fire cured is. What’s dark air? Twernt none in Pendleton county in the 80’s or 90’s
Also, how does the sale go? Is it still auctioned off at the warehouse or I thought I heard the farmer sells direct to the buyer now?
the gobermint bought off tobacco, long ago, best i remember, then imported from Turkey. poor memory i got. that stuff would numb ya up. sorta like buying, from certain country's.
You just air cure the dark like burley. Growing up in the Purchase Area of western Kentucky dark fire cured was king, a “big” farmer had 15+ acres. They’d generally have a small burley base of a 2-3 thousand pounds, just a few rows beside all the dark. Last was and is dark air cured, with only a minority having any base at all and as an edit, seems like it was allocated by the stick or at least that’s how I heard the farmers refer to it. They had X number of acres of dark base, X pounds of burley base and X sticks of dark air cured. Not sure if the dark air cured was base or contracted back then. Seems like it brought $1.25-$1.75 back in the day. I can’t tell you much about the business anymore, it’s all been relegated to a few big boy farmers and their huge migrant Messican crews these day, where having 100 acres is small potatoes. Teen boys today believe they’re too good for field work. Call me bitter but it would do my heart good to see a bunch of these punks with a hoe slapped in their hands and be made to work all day in the hot sun til those hands cracked and bled. Call me a number one certified butthole lol but it never killed me.
Yes the old gooberment price support system is gone, no more grading and auctions. The farmers contract directly with the tobacco companies and grow as much as they can produce. As soon as they got rid of the price support the companies suddenly were unconcerned with things like grades, finish from the fire being perfect, perfectly tied heads, etc. It became obvious the companies made the farmers jump through crazy, labor intensive and most importantly unnecessary hoops for decades just because they could.
I started crawling on my hands and knees priming the bottom leaves off Burley when I was 6 years old. Stringing it up on wires straddling a stick hung in the barn to cure. I never thought much about Child Labor or Slavery....we ALL just had to work and Life was GOOD. I could go on but.....
