When to Harvest Tobacco Leaves?

[Juxtaposer]

I'm under the impression that leaves can be harvested at ANY time although there is more or less optimal times. The differences between young to old leaves may not be so great as to affect a flavored snus. As for drying/curing, this to may not be as important for snus as it is for other tobacco products so leaves that dry green may still be used. In fact a snus including chlorophyll may be a good style to try. Of course we all know well cured and aged tobacco is delicious. Your options should be limitless. Good luck all and please keep us posted. Thanks.

[snupy]

The Turkish leaves, being much smaller than the posted pic of the Virginia, are almost completely dry and have dried green. The Virginia leaves, being much bigger and thicker, are nowhere near dry, but appear to be yellowing in spots at least so far.

[chadizzy1]

If anybody is going to be harvesting tobacco/making snus of their own - I'd drop some money in the pool, just let me know.

[snupy]

You know, it's actually so cheap to grow it, no money is really necessary. I only bought seed for two species. 6 other species, most of which were exotic orientals, I got free from the USDA seed bank. That left me with seed for 8 species, which online trading with other growers expanded those 8 into 17. (Ok, a small bit of cost for postage for seed trades.) I have no burleys though, since I am not into strong tobaccos. I do have seed for rustica, but only for mixing tiny amounts to bump the nic hit a little and possibly add for flavor. Virginia and Oriental blends are really my thing, although I am not sure how that mix will translate from smoking to snus.

The only costs are peat pellets and/or jiffy greenhouses for sprouting, then potting soil and styrofoam cups for division and prep for transplanting in the ground.

[MojoQuestor]

Man, this all sounds fascinating. I really think I'm going to try this next year.

[JimInMaryland]

Former tobacco grower

I'll throw in my two cents - it may help someone. I grew up in Kentucky on a farm and raised acres of *burley* tobacco as a cash crop for many years (60s and 70s). I'm not sure how relevant that is to this discussion but it may be useful and of interest. The general time frame was:

March: prepare the beds for the seed
April: seed the beds and cover with plastic. Tobacco seeds are VERY small.
May/June: pull the plants from the beds (12-18 inches high) and transfer to growing fields
August: hand-remove all flowers (break/cut off) from the plants when the field was about 35% bloomed. This forced the plants to quit growing tall and put all final growth into the leaves. Since it was sold by weight, you wanted very heavy leaves on the plants.
~3 weeks later: Hand cut all the plants - leaves were generally about 70-75% yellow. Put plants on sticks and let them dry out in the field for 4-5 days.
Hang (house) tobacco in barns to finish drying. Doors were open on the barns to let air in to help cure the tobacco. Doors were generally closed permanently when it was frosting regularly in the mornings.
Nov/Dec: Get hanging plants down from barn. Remove leaves from plants and bundle for sale. You may have had to wet them so they wouldn't crumble.

I believe once sold, the tobacco was actually stored and aged for somewhere around 3-5 years - to mellow - before it actually went into cigarettes and other tobacco products. I know it was VERY strong when I tried smoking it a couple of times while bundling it for sale .

Cutting and housing tobacco was the hardest physical labor and nastiest general work I've ever done .

Since I've moved to Maryland, I've discovered they had a slightly different method of curing the tobacco (fire-cured???) but I've never seen it done.

All of this is long gone now. I don't even see tobacco being grown when I go back to Kentucky to visit anymore (or in Maryland for that matter - not sure about Virginia). Many of the farms I knew in the area have become mini-farm (10-40 acre) subdivisions. One reason I finally quit farming (other than the long hours and uneven yearly profits) was that the labor pool to help cut and house tobacco (the best margin product you could grow at the time) had almost completely dried up and the cost of labor was becoming prohibitive. Growing tobacco on a large scale was a manual process - very little automation was possible. It was also time sensitive - if you couldn't get the labor to cut it and then more labor get it to the barns quickly once it dried, you were in serious trouble.

Well, enough geezing on the past - didn't mean to digress so much.. For those growing small plots, I hope the time frame for growing I outlined was useful. I actually think that makes a lot of sense being done on a small scale and I may look into this myself (though when I quit farming, I SWORE I would never handle a tobacco plant again! .


Jim

[RRK]

Interesting story. One of my teachers in high school said her father was a tobacco farmer and she said you would get tobacco burns on you hands from cutting tobacco all day, is this true? Also, did all of the tobacco farms close down because of that government buy out or what? Seems like they have just increased production over seas since then, but I still see a lot driving down I-75.

[JimInMaryland]

Re: Tobacco Farms

RRK,

I think the government buy-out program shut a lot down but that actually came about after I stopped farming. When I stopped (around 1978), most of the farmers I knew were switching to soybeans because getting labor at the right times to harvest large amounts of tobacco was getting too unpredictable.

This was in Central Kentucky between Lexington and Winchester. Much of the farmland I knew is gone because many of the small towns around Lexington have basically become bedroom suburbs of Lexington. I haven't been on I-75 in a long time, so I don't know about the rest of the state. I'm sure tobacco is still grown in Kentucky but I haven't seen any in the areas I knew around Lexington in a while. In fact, all the tobacco warehouses in Lexington are gone to my knowledge. I'm there about twice a year.

As for the tobacco burns, I always wore gloves but some people did not. I'm sure you could get burns and blisters from the hatchet you had to carry and the rough tobacco stalks. Basically, cutting tobacco used to involve: placing a stick in the ground at an angle, putting a sharp metal tip (a "spear") on the end of it, grabbing a stalk and bending it, cutting it low to the ground with a sharp, hatchet-like tool, grabbing the cut stalk with both hands and forcing it onto the stick - the sharp tip split the stalk and allowed it to go on. Six stalks went on a stick. And, yes, it was dangerous - I ran the tip into my hand a couple of times and just missed falling on it many times. I knew one kid who fell on the spear and just missed his heart. He is alive today but has a large scar on his chest. Even without that, it is back-breaking work. People were paid by how many sticks they cut a day. Good cutters could cut in the hundreds of sticks per day.

Hope this answered your question.

Jim

[sagedil]

My wife's grandma grew tobacco on her small farm in South Carolina at lest until she was in her 80's.

My wife used to talk bout being forced to work in the field as a kid. To this day, she absolutely despises tobacco.

EDIT .. ex-wife :wink:

[snupy]

Re: Former tobacco grower

March: prepare the beds for the seed
April: seed the beds and cover with plastic.

I forgot what this method is called. I would really like to do lasagna beds for the baccy, but those must be done now, so the layers can be well rotted by spring.

Tobacco seeds are VERY small.

All you see is white specs when they first come up.

May/June: pull the plants from the beds (12-18 inches high) and transfer to growing fields

You transplant as late as June? I would like to have mine in the ground 5/1, but frosts are possible up to 5/15, I think. I transplanted mine from peat pellets to styrofoam cups not long after they had sprouted, using a 1/8 teaspoon as the 'shovel,' but only because I had read they were like tomato plants and didn't put down roots early.

August: hand-remove all flowers (break/cut off) from the plants when the field was about 35% bloomed. This forced the plants to quit growing tall and put all final growth into the leaves.

Topping

Hand cut all the plants - leaves were generally about 70-75% yellow.

I missed that this year, due to late planting (7/1).

Nov/Dec: Get hanging plants down from barn. Remove leaves from plants and bundle for sale. You may have had to wet them so they wouldn't crumble.

Is wetting/humidifying called bringing into 'case,' or does that term not apply until after flavoring?

I believe once sold, the tobacco was actually stored and aged for somewhere around 3-5 years - to mellow - before it actually went into cigarettes and other tobacco products.

My guru of sorts in this waits two years to smoke his crops. I don't think he uses any sort of curing chamber, just air curing. I am planning on storing any extra leaves. I hope to be able to store some leaf for the future. I would LOVE to be able to hand blend cigs for smokers at dinner parties down the road.

Since I've moved to Maryland, I've discovered they had a slightly different method of curing the tobacco (fire-cured???) but I've never seen it done.

There is a way to build a curing chamber for smoking tobacco, which can be found on the coffin nails website. It involves heat and humidity and takes about 4 weeks to make a smokable product.

Well, enough geezing on the past - didn't mean to digress so much..

Thanks for digressing. This is fascinating.

For those growing small plots, I hope the time frame for growing I outlined was useful.

It actually confirms what I have been planning for 2010.

Did you ever get two crops out of one season, in particular using a second 'sucker' crop? Here's an outline of the method:

"The second growth samsun 15 were almost five feet tall when I harvested them. What do I mean by second growth and third growth? After harvesting I cut the original stalks to two or three leaf nodes and allowed one sucker to grow. They grew to nice leaf producing stalks for what I call my "sucker crop". I plan to plant earlier next year, reducing my total number of plants to 120 - 150 but harvesting early enough to allow the "sucker crop" time to mature. This way I'll get nearly twice the yield from a given number of plants. From 120 plants I could probably get 50 lbs." Read the second post on this page (with the picture of the Samsun leaf) by the username 'tekwyzrd'

[justintempler]

snupy,

The curing chamber on coffinnails is the way I plan to go.

---

From what I've gathered so far, tobacco that hasn't undergone aging or is a darker leaf tobacco requires a longer cooking time. That's why the cook time in recipes varies anywhere from 24 hours - 5 days. As an example, a burley tobacco that has been aged for one year would might do fine with a 24 hour cooktime but a freshly harvested crop of Kentucky Dark Air Cured might require 5 days in the snus oven.

Our salt is our casing material, and we take advantage of something called the Maillard reaction which causes a forced aging, which for us replaces traditional fermentation. The Maillard reaction is what causes our tobacco to darken during cooking.

Casing is normally done at 140°F and above.
The Maillard reaction (forced aging) is normally done between 160°-190° F.
190°F is the preferred temperature but the Maillard reaction is exothermic (creates it's own heat) and if we aren't careful and the temperature rises above 200° F for any length of time, we get burnt tasting tobacco.

[snupy]

snupy,
The curing chamber on coffinnails is the way I plan to go.

And this is my confusion as I mentioned earlier. I thought air curing was recommended, since the REAL curing for snus is pasteurization. On the other hand, fire or flue curing (which the coffin nails chamber IS flue curing) are what lead to high levels of TSNAs. Now, that might not matter if pasteurization lowers the TSNAs, but these are the areas in which I am confused as far as correct curing for snus.

From what I've gathered so far, tobacco that hasn't undergone aging or is a darker leaf tobacco requires a longer cooking time. That's why the cook time in recipes varies anywhere from 24 hours - 5 days. As an example, a burley tobacco that has been aged for one year would might do fine with a 24 hour cooktime but a freshly harvested crop of Kentucky Dark Air Cured might require 5 days in the snus oven.

That makes sense.

Our salt is our casing material, and we take advantage of something called the Maillard reaction which causes a forced aging, which for us replaces traditional fermentation. The Maillard reaction is what causes our tobacco to darken during cooking.

I haven't done it, but that's exactly what I suspected, as far as the darkening during cooking.

The Maillard reaction (forced aging) is normally done between 160°-190° F.
190°F is the preferred temperature but the Maillard reaction is exothermic (creates it's own heat) and if we aren't careful and the temperature rises above 200° F for any length of time, we get burnt tasting tobacco.

This I need to file, not just on the temp ranges, but also on the upper range to avoid.

[justintempler]

I thought air curing was recommended, since the REAL curing for snus is pasteurization.

Pasteurization is not curing. Pasteurization is to kill the microbes.

Pasteurization during cooking.
130°F/54°C - 112 minutes
135°F/57°C - 35 minutes
140°F/60°C - 12 minutes
145°F/62°C - 4 minutes
150°F/65°C - 90 seconds
165°F/74°C - 2 seconds

Pasteurization is a very small part of what we do when we cook snus. Most of what we are doing is using a forced aging method utilizing the Maillard reaction.

As I understand it, flue curing in itself is not bad, it depends on the conditions, using smoke and/or the fumes from the propane/oil burners that they used creates an anerobic (oxygen deprived atmosphere) and that is what causes more TSNA formation.

A curing chamber is compromise if you have the time and the space to let your leaves dry naturally then of course that would be preferred but using a curing chamber isn't nearly as bad as using smoke or propane exhaust the the tobacco companies used to use in high volume production.


http://www.smokinglobby.com/tobacco-...-nitrosamines/

...The use of direct-fire burners fueled by propane gas to flue-cure tobaccos began in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Fisher, 2000). These burners exhaust combustion gases directly into the tobacco-curing barn, exposing the curing tobacco to NOx gases that result from incomplete fuel combustion. These gases react with alkaloids in the tobacco to form TSNAs. Tobacco curing operations that do not expose the curing tobacco to exhaust gases (e.g., heat exchange curing methods) eliminate this source of TSNA formation....

Barns, and attics are curing chambers too. :wink:

Curing chambers ≠ flue cured.

[justintempler]

Now, that might not matter if pasteurization lowers the TSNAs, but these are the areas in which I am confused as far as correct curing for snus..

Pasteurization prevents the formation of future TSNAs
but it does NOT lower the level of TSNAs that are already there.

[Snusdog]

Hats off guys this is very fascinating.