Subscribe
Community
For some farmers, tobacco is still traditional crop
Most growers took state buyout
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Farmers load up spears of tobacco from a field along Thompson Corner Road in Mechanicsville. The Amish and Mennonite communities in the northern county did not participate in the state tobacco buyout that began in 2000.
|
E-Mail This Article
For generations tobacco fields in St. Mary's County were filled in late summer with farmers and workers cutting down the crop to hang it in barns for curing.
Now fields of tobacco are few and far between; starting in 2000 the state began paying farmers to give up the traditional cash crop. That program starts to end next year. The bulk of remaining tobacco is grown in northern St. Mary's.
Robert Anderson Jr., owner of Anderson's Bar in Clements, grew 6 acres of burley tobacco this year and had it cut last week. Part of the crop was grown on a third of an acre next to the old store in Clements.
"I used to live in that little house and that was my garden," he said. The land was available and he wanted to keep it productive, so he had some tobacco planted there right off the road.
Just about all tobacco grown now is of the burley variety, said Donna Sasscer, agricultural specialist with the St. Mary's department of economic and community development. It's also grown in Kentucky and Tennessee.
The old system of taking tobacco to the warehouse for auction is gone. Now tobacco companies offer contracts to farmers for the burley tobacco.
Anderson has a contract with Philip Morris for his tobacco. "It's real nice. It always makes a nice piece of tobacco," he said.
Anderson, who turns 70 in December, is one of the few farmers who didn't enter into the tobacco buyout. "I didn't want to sell my heritage," he said. His grandson works in Washington, D.C., but is also interested in continuing the family tradition in farming, Anderson said.
The Amish and Mennonite communities in the northern county never entered into the state buyout either.
In St. Mary's 288 buyout contracts were entered into, according to the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission.
Cutting tobacco is labor intensive. It means bending over each plant to hack it down, then spearing four to six plants on a tobacco stick. They are then loaded onto a trailer or wagon heading for the barn to cure. The sticks are hung from the top of the barn on down. "You're straddling, standing on two poles and reaching down to grab something," Sasscer said.
Each plant is heavy. "Tobacco looks good this year. It is big. You're talking about a lot of weight" with all the rain this year, she said.
"It was hard work," said Commissioner Thomas A. Mattingly Sr. (D), who worked on a property off Cedar Lane Road when he was a young man. "It was a little bit of fun, but a lot of hard work," he said. "It was heavy, but it was the way you handled it. It was a rhythm you got into."
Anderson didn't help with the cutting this year because of a recent back operation, but he still did the tractor work.
See related stories
