Besides bourbon, fried chicken, and a particular horse race on the first Saturday in May, Kentucky is known for its tobacco. Kentucky grows about 70% of all burley tobacco produced in the United States. Burley is a light, air cured (as opposed to flue cured, which uses heat) tobacco that is primarily used in cigarettes.
My family raised tobacco (or 'bakker' as we called it) for generations but cheap foreign tobacco and the end of price supports eventually made it to where it wasn't worth the trouble and we stopped growing it when I was in high school. The photo above is of the top part of a tobacco barn, where the tobacco is hung to cure. My grandfather spent the last 11 years of his life brain damaged and crippled after falling from the top part of our barn while hanging tobacco.
When we grew tobacco, we'd start it in a bed after it'd been treated to kill anything else growing in it. Once the plants were about a foot tall, usually late May or early June we would transplant them into the fields. We had a piece of machinery we called a setter that attached to the back of the tractor to accomplish this. It was basically two seats and baskets with a wheel between them that rotated as the tractor moved, the wheel had arms that would grab the tobacco plants we put in them and place them in the soil as the wheel turned. As a kid my main job was following the setter, making sure there was plenty of soil around each plant and fixing any screw-ups, mostly my cousin putting the plants in upside down.
Once tobacco starts getting big it begins to flower, after this had been going on for a bit we'd go through the fields with knives, 'topping' the tobacco by cutting off the flower. This is done so that the leaves grow bigger instead of the flower. About a month later we would cut the plants and spike them on 'bakker sticks' (pictured below) before hanging in the barn to cure.
Hanging occurred in the fall and after a couple months the tobacco was cured, leaving only one final step before it was ready to go to market. This last step was 'stripping' where the tobacco was taken down from where it hung, taken off the sticks and then the leaves were stripped from the stalks of the plant. During this process the good tobacco leaves were sorted and separated from the suckers, which are discarded along with the stalks. Let's just say that doing this in a breezy and uninsulated barn in January is not the most pleasant of tasks...you will get a hell of a nicotine buzz from all the gummy gunk that comes off the leaves if you don't wear gloves too, which doesn't help things any.
After that the tobacco is ready to be bundled up and carted off to be sold! These photos of the tobacco are from the Kentucky State Fair a few years ago, the ones of the barn are of one that is still in use in Ewing, Kentucky.