Ever smoked a cigarette? If you did and it was an American brand, odds are good that you were smoking some Kentucky grown tobacco. Tobacco, or bakker as we called it where I grew up, has been grown here since before Kentucky was even a state.
Here in Kentucky we mostly grow burley tobacco, with the state accounting for something like 70% of all the burley grown in the US. While it's always been a cash crop, it's status as such as been in decline for quite some time.
Tobacco barns are different from other barns, they're not meant for critters or storing anything but tobacco. When the tobacco is cut in the fields it is spiked on sticks and then hung in these barns. (Check out this video to see how it gets on the sticks) The barns are painted black to better soak up the sun, which is the only source of heat to dry and cure the tobacco. (Other types of tobacco, called flue-cured, use the heat of a fire piped into the barn by a flue to heat and cure it.)
Notice all the poles running across the beams in the photo above? That's what the sticks with the tobacco are placed on, with multiple levels going up to the roof of the barn. Much like the rest of farming, hanging tobacco isn't the most risk-free of endeavors, my grandfather fell while doing it and stuck his head leaving him brain-damaged for the rest of his life.
This weekend I got to wander in and shoot a barn that was until recently still in use and these photos are all from that adventure. Tobacco barns have a distinct smell and even though there hadn't been any tobacco in this one for a year or so it still smelled like it did.
Anyone else ever grow tobacco, burley or otherwise?
