Tobacco Documents Online

- MACHINERY MAY SUPPLANT TRADITIONAL . , ~ . , . "make a crop," says the current issue of Tobacco News, published by HAND LABOR IN NATIONI''S TOBACCO LANDS Washington -- Machines now under development may one day relieve -the nation's 750,000 tobacco farms of the hand labor now required to The Tobacco Institute, Inc. growing started in this country. ..,. ., , , . .. : required in tobacco fields today is nearly the same as when tobacco- Stephen E. Wrather, director of the Tobacc9 Division of the U.S. Agricultural Marketing Service, writes in Tobacco News that hand labor Tobacco demands from 300 to 500 man-hours of hand labor per acre, far more than any other field crop, he writes.- Tobacco growers also find field labor increasingly hard to obtain. Today, agricultural colleges at three tobacco-state universities are working on the mechanization problem. University of Kentucky researchers have developed a method of pelleting tiny tobacco seed in clay so they can be planted in the field by a mechanical planter. _ ~ . _.. . A leaf-picking machine is being developed by the University of Connecticut for cigar-binder leaf grown in the Connecticut-Massachusetts area. At North Carolina State College, experiments are under way in 0 ~ bulk curing of packed leaves, a method which would eliminate the I laborious stringing of leaves on a stick, the age-old method. G? W'