DANVILLE (Virginia) REGISTER-BEE

April 29, 2007

PLANTING SEASON

Spring heralds return to the fields

By REBECCA BLANTON

Register & Bee staff writer

The boys of summer are back.

For most of the nation, that means baseball, hot dogs and sunny afternoons. But in North Carolina and Virginia, it also means tobacco-planting time.

For Kenlon Knight, 15, and his friends, summer means both.

The young men all play baseball for McMichael High School - and they’re good. Very good. Their team is undefeated in the district, almost undefeated for the season.

“It’s a school record,” Knight says, his smile telling the story. “Nineteen and three.”

But any further baseball talk is broken by the rumble of a tractor, driven by Kenlon’s father, Kevin Knight, owner of the tobacco farm off Elisboro Road just outside Madison, N.C. The crew - which consists of Kenlon and friends Allen Webster, Kramer Joyce and Ethan Satterfield, along with four H-2A (or legal immigrant) workers and field boss Wallace “Red” Oieler - springs into action. Some of the crew restocks seedlings, changing out empty trays from a trailer piled high with young tobacco plants. Other boys swing bags of fertilizer into the outstretched arms of the Hispanic helpers, who dump the bags into a spreader on the back of the tractor.

Meanwhile, in front of the tractor, Oieler fills the liquid fertilizer tanks.

The frenzied activity of restocking takes less than two minutes - hardly enough time for the dust to settle down before the tractor is chugging off down another row.

With the tractor back in motion, Kenlon has a moment to talk about tobacco planting.

“We just got done with burley, we’re starting off with flue-cured today,” Knight says as his father disappears over a small rise. He rattles off numbers, acreage and tobacco facts as easily as he does batting statistics and box scores.

“So we had to change everything from 22 inches to 24 inches apart. With burley, you put like 1,700 to 2,000 plants per acre; with flue-cured, it’s 1,500 plants per acre. You’ve gotta have your plants spaced out enough for chemicals to go through - insecticide, herbicide, all that good stuff.”

The science of tobacco may have changed, but not much else has. Tobacco is still a labor-intensive crop. Producers say human hands touch the average tobacco stalk at least 10 times before it’s harvested. The biggest change: the cost of planting.

The Knights have made the switch to burley, Kenlon says, because flue-cured doesn’t carry the profit it once did. With the cost of fuel again on the rise, burley seems the way many farmers are going. Kevin Knight grew only two acres of burley in 2005, but increased to 33 acres in 2006. This year, he’s planning on about 30 acres.

He’s also keeping an eye on labor costs, another area that impacts profits, by buying a specialized harvester that will reduce his labor requirements by half.

It’s all about the numbers: profit margin, planting costs, fuel costs.

But it’s worth it. Per acre, nothing pays quite like King Tobacco - even after the federal buyout, which removed the tobacco quota that restricted how much farmers could sell.

The Knights, who have grown tobacco for 25 years, are planting more tobacco now than before the buyout, Kenlon says. The family contracts directly with a major tobacco company.

“They buy it all,” Kenlon says. “We got 30 acres of burley, 200 acres of tobacco all together. Biggest (growers) in the county.”

Out in the tobacco fields, the days are long. The Knights were up and active by 7 a.m., at the greenhouse picking up tobacco plants.

“It’s a good job, though,” Kenlon smiles. “On a good day, you can do about 15 acres, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Today, we’ll get about 10.”

As the season progresses, the breezes will get hotter - and so will the work. Summer won’t be all labor, though. There’ll still be baseball.

“Twenty days ’til school’s out,” Kenlon says. “You gonna come watch us play next week? We’re gonna win. You oughtta be there.”

Today, however, is all about tobacco. They watch as the tractor chugs toward them once again, gauging the next reload swing by the number of empty trays on the tractor each time it reaches the end of a row. There’s time to joke, to talk, to brag about the season.

“State champs,” Kenlon grins.

A stiff breeze blows almost cold across the fields - the kind of breeze that’d blow a ball foul or fair.

But today it ruffles tobacco seedlings and lots of them.