Into the Belly of the Beast: The 2002 North Carolina Flue-Cured Tobacco Tour

Someone in Chapel Hill actually thinks about tobacco?" I've heard this sentiment twice already today, but this time the speaker explains the surprise behind it: "Most days I think those folks don't know what supports them." I laugh my agreement, and we shake hands. She urges me to get a plate of dinner, pointing out that the hundred-odd people with nametags have already eaten. Besides, this is her home, and she insists. So I get a plate and fill it from the vats of meat and potatoes and green beans and corn. I grab a biscuit and a Styrofoam cup of iced tea, and take a seat. It's noontime on the second day of the 2002 North Carolina Flue-Cured Tobacco Tour. After our meal we're going down to the curing barns to see a state-of-the-art box-loading machine. The machine stands as the centerpiece of a prototype harvest-and-curing system that will get the leaf off the plant, precision-cured to its buyer's specifications, and out the door—all without the touch of human hands. At the moment, though, the system is still under construction: modified school buses serve to carry the tobacco leaves to the box-loader, while Hispanic workers perched above the machine on frames rigged out of two-by-fours frantically rake the harvest up the conveyor belts.

This system is just the latest in a series of technological and organizational processes that have transformed "bright" tobacco culture in the past few decades. The most obvious recent change—the death of the warehouse system of leaf marketing—gets a lot of media attention. For a century, the warehouse auctions mediated between agriculture and industry, demonstrating both the links and the divisions between manufacturing and raw material production in the tobacco industry. The colorful ritual is now giving way to direct contracts between grower and buyer, often penned before the farmer sets the seedlings in the field. Yet the demise of the warehouses obscures more important but subtler changes in agricultural production. The bright tobacco culture that flourished on the North Carolina-Virginia border, eventually spreading south into parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, was once characterized by arduous, skilled labor, but since World War II agricultural mechanization has dramatically changed bright tobacco agriculture, especially its uses of land and labor. Technological change, however, is both the cause and the effect of social and economic transformations. The recent mechanization of bright tobacco agriculture provides a vivid illustration of how technological and social processes work together to change each other. ¹

The box-loading machine appears at the twelfth stop on the tobacco tour, which lasts two days and extends over dozens of farms and agricultural experiment stations in six counties. Sponsored by various departments at North Carolina State University (including plant pathology, crop science, entomology, and biological and agricultural engineering), the tour brings together different sectors of the tobacco industry: growers and buyers, chemical salesmen and global competitors, academics and the public. For many, it's an opportunity to visit with old friends, examine new technology, and eyeball this year's crop. N.C. State sponsors the tour to demonstrate its extension work and to exhibit the fieldwork of agricultural research stations. Months of experimentation have produced information about varietal disease resistance, insecticides, and fungicides. Tip studies have attempted to wrest more value from the topmost leaves of the plant. The [Begin Page 28] tour stops at field after field of tobacco where the rows bear placards that say what was done to them. We walk into the fields to finger the leaves and make our own judgments: Did this chemical control the mosaic virus and, in this year's drought, prevent stunting? What resistance do different varieties show to the different kinds of black shank disease? When did budworms take over...