UNITED STATES: Future not bright for growers

Workers on an eastern North Carolina farm sort good leaf from bad on a conveyor belt.

SPRINGFIELD, TN.—As the year came to an end, the outlook for the major U.S. tobacco types was growing dim.

Estimates of the volume of the American burley crop that is just now being marketed vary widely, but all estimates indicate that this is the smallest burley crop since records have been kept. has been projected at 90 million pounds.

Daniel Green, chief operating officer of the Burley Stabilization Corporation in Springfield, Tenn., says the shortfall resulted in part from the substantial cutbacks in plantings made by growers last spring—20 percent according to USDA—but late-season rains were the major factor.

But the quality of this burley crop is decent, says Green, as the last two crops were. “You could call this crop ‘low in volume but acceptable in quality’,” he says. “But much of the leaf is thin. There isn’t a lot of the good-bodied redder styles that buyers are looking for.”

There was plenty of dark red leaf in the 2018 flue-cured crop, but for this type, red is undesirable. A reduction in contract offerings for this type is considered all but certain by market observers, and the Executive Vice President of the N.C tobacco growers association, Graham Boyd, predicted outright that the 2019 crop would be the smallest American flue-cured crop since records were kept.