Hard hand work for a crop

The warm weather we experienced in the days around Christmas has a name – if you are acquainted with tobacco in Wisconsin. When the warm air hits the colder, snow-covered land, it creates fog. Drivers may not like it, deer hunters may not like it, but tobacco farmers did. It’s called case weather.

Tobacco in Wisconsin was primarily grown around Westby and Stoughton. Most farmers had an allotment controlled by the government to keep overproduction from destroying the price. Those farmers who raised tobacco usually had one to four acres. Today there are very few farms growing tobacco because of the intense hand work required. But with milk prices from $3-8 per hundredweight in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, tobacco saved a lot of family farms. My father always said it paid the farm taxes and a farm payment.

Tobacco growing starts in May with a steamer, which was really an old steam engine pulled by a truck. The steam produced by the steamer was blown into an upside-down stainless steel pan about 5 feet wide and 12 feet long for 20 minutes. This sterilized the soil. Steaming was repeated as many times as the owner desired to create a bed in which the tobacco seeds were planted by mixing them in a sprinkler can and spreading them over the sterilized soil. The beds were hand sprinkled with water every day. Too much water and mold was created, too little water and the little plants died. These beds were covered with cotton covers to keep them as warm as possible. When the plants reached 5-6 inches tall, they were transplanted by pulling them out by hand and taking them to a planter where two people, usually kids, were seated on a planter and alternately placed the seedlings into the ground. One unlucky kid had to follow the planter and hand plant if a seedling was missed. This was done in the second week of June.

If it rained within the next two weeks, we pulled more plants from the beds, walked the entire fields and replanted any plants that died or were missed. This is also when the job of hoeing began. Every single weed was eliminated. Cultivating with a small tractor such as a Farmall Cub, going as slow as possible, was boring, but much better than hoeing. Cultivating was done two or three times before the tobacco got too big. When the plants started to flower in early August, the tops were broken off so that the remaining leaves would grow larger. Tobacco worms were also picked off and squashed, and a spray was applied to the plants to prevent suckers. All of this was done by hand.

A couple weeks later, harvest began. Each plant was chopped off at ground level and laid gently over to start wilting. Imagine doing this every 15 inches for 100 yards before bending to look up again. There was usually another person chopping the next row, so nobody stopped. After lying for a couple hours, the plants wilted and could be handled without causing much damage. Then about 40-50 plants were assembled into small piles. This was another kid job. Older people generally did the next step, which was called spearing. A stainless steel cover, about 6 inches long with a sharp point, was placed over a 48-inch-long lathe about 1.5 inches wide. The tobacco stocks were speared near the butt end and put on the lathes until it held five or six stocks. The full lathe was laid on the ground and more full lathes were piled on top of it. A wagon would come along, load the lathes and take them to a shed. One crew loaded wagons and one crew unloaded wagons. In the tobacco shed, the lathes were hung and spaced about 6 inches apart. This allowed the leaves to cure and dry. My job at this point was the top person standing on 4-inch diameter poles about 30 feet above the ground with one foot on each pole and catching the lathes from the person below me. The curing process took about three months. When fully cured, the leaves are very dry and will crumble. This is where Mother Nature would help by creating case weather. When tobacco was in case it was accumulating moisture and became ready to handle. Most years this happened when the kids were on Thanksgiving vacation. That is when the lathes were taken down and piled tightly in the shed to conserve the moisture in the leaves.

The next process was moving some of these lathes each day to a warm barn so the plants could be stripped of their leaves. This was done in our stanchion barn on the alley between the cows. A lathe was placed in a holder and the leaves were stripped off according to their quality by hand. One lathe usually had two handfuls of leaves that were put in boxes lined with paper and compressed to form bales weighing about 60 pounds. The best leaves would become cigar wrappers. The poorest leaves were ground and put inside cigars.

Although all the work was by hand, many hands helped. Our neighbors and friends helped during planting and harvesting, and we shared our workload with each other. We also shared meals. As youngsters, eating these huge meals, prepared by my mother and other ladies, was quite an experience, especially listening to the older people. Every single person sweat every day during harvest and passed the water jug around to the next person. As kids we felt like we helped our parents. We had no idea of the value of that crop, but we knew the value of work.