On a recent July morning, Dwight Arnold stood in front of one of his Connecticut shade tobacco fields, the plants shielded from the sun by a white shade cloth, barking orders to the mix of men and local high school kids lying on the ground trying to pluck the lowest leaves on rows of 8- to 10-foot-high plants.
It was the first round of picking for the last man growing Connecticut shade tobacco on his family’s farm — even though the farm is just across the border in Massachusetts.
For over a century, cigars wrapped in light brown Connecticut shade tobacco have been considered among the best in the world and, as late as the mid-1980s, farmers from Suffield to Windsor were growing thousands of acres of it in what is known as the Upper Connecticut River Valley.
“Then the demand just kind of fell off, and one by one, they just kind of started to fall by the wayside and switched to something else,” Arnold said.
As demand dropped and the pressure to develop the land grew, many Connecticut farmers turned to an alternative: Connecticut Broadleaf.
Connecticut Broadleaf is easier to cultivate and is used as filler tobacco in many brand-name cigars. Experts say you can also grow more of it per acre, as much as 500 pounds more than shade.
But Arnold, whose great-grandfather purchased the Southwick farm in the 1870s, never stopped growing the iconic shade variety.
“There were years when we didn’t know who we’re going to sell it to, and I was only growing like 15 acres, and it was, well, let’s see if I can sell this stuff,” Arnold said.
This year, he planted 35 acres of shade tobacco because the General Cigar Co., which produces Macanudo brands, has agreed to buy it all for use in some of its premium cigars.
Connecticut shade actually comes from a Sumatran seed that was brought here around 1900, Arnold said.
It is called shade tobacco because it grows with protection from the sun. The white cloth provides cover from the sun but also creates more humid conditions underneath it — similar to Sumatra.
Arnold and his crew of about 50 workers will do six pickings of the giant tobacco leaves; the very fine veins spreading from the stem separate shade tobacco leaves from other varieties, signaling potentially unmatched flavor.
“Shade is so expensive to grow because it gets handled so many times. It has to be tied and wrapped as it grows up, picked by hand and then sewn together. It’s extremely labor intensive,” said Dr. James LaMondia, a soil scientist for The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, or CAES, who has been working with tobacco farmers since the 1980s.
But the intensive work that goes into growing and harvesting shade tobacco is one of the reasons many cigar companies shifted their operations away from the upper Connecticut River Valley to Ecuador and Nicaragua, which have similar soil and climates but decidedly cheaper labor.
“They’re paying somebody for a week, probably what workers here will be paid in a couple of hours,” LaMondia said.
The tobacco grown in South America uses Connecticut seed, but it is not the same.
“They’ll say it’s Connecticut shade tobacco, but that’s misleading, because it’s basically Connecticut seed but not Connecticut grown,’” LaMondia said, adding they “produce what I consider to be a lesser quality, but a better price.”
Arduous work
It’s 10 a.m. when Arnold yells for everyone to stop and take a 15-minute break. They started at about 7 a.m., when it was cooler out, but it’s hot now — even more so under the white shade cloth where the picking occurs. The mesh covering is made of polypropylene and is designed to replicate the humidity of Sumatra, Arnold said.
The mix of veteran pickers and younger local high school kids grab a drink from a water tank and wet their heads to cool off.
Arnold, a reed-thin 62-year-old, calls them all by name.
There’s Jackson, who has picked tobacco for 40 years. Henry, who is wearing a homemade contraption that looks like a large reverse fanny pack to protect himself as he slides along the ground, has been picking for over 30 years. Arnold makes sure to check on a teenage boy who just started picking a day earlier.
The work is arduous. They slide close to the ground so they can get the leaves at the bottom of the giant plants that are ready to be harvested. They then gently place the leaves into a 4-foot-long plastic bin, sliding halfway up each 400-foot row of plants and then down the next until the bin is full. The bins are placed on “sleds” custom-made by Arnold to exactly fit the bins inside. They pull the sleds by ropes at either end.
Full bins are left at the end of the row, covered with a cloth. If the tobacco wasn’t covered, Arnold said, the sun would start burning the tobacco within 20 minutes. However, a tractor usually comes along within minutes to grab the full bins and transport them back to the barn for stitching.
At every step, the tobacco must be handled gently, because the leaves must be pristine if they are going to be used to wrap a high-end cigar.
“They can’t have any blemishes. They can’t have any leaf spots,” LaMondia said. “It’s a high-risk crop, because before you ever get anything back, you’re putting out tens of thousands of dollars to produce the crop.”
The tobacco is transported back to a barn where another group of workers uses a machine, specifically designed for tobacco growers more than 70 years ago, that is a combination sewing machine and upside down conveyor belt to string the leaves together.
Then, they are hung from the rafters inside the barn for up to six weeks at temperatures hovering around 100 degrees.
They first turn yellow and then ultimately a light brown that is similar to the color of beach sand.
Arnold said about 2,000 pounds of tobacco leaves can be hung in the barn. Once it’s dried, it will be shipped to the Dominican Republic, where Macanudo will finish the process, including drying it even more.
It takes more than a year from when a tobacco leaf is picked to when it is ready to be used to wrap a cigar.
A different tobacco
The faded red barns on Arnold’s farm were once synonymous with the tobacco industry here in Connecticut. Hundreds of them dotted the country roads that cross the Upper Connecticut River Valley.
But as farmers stopped selling Connecticut shade, the barns slowly started to disappear.
The starkest example of this can be found on the road leading to Bradley International Airport, where a row of tobacco barns that belonged to the O.J. Thrall Company — at one time perhaps the largest Connecticut shade tobacco producer in the state — were torn down and replaced with a giant Amazon warehouse.
Another long-time tobacco grower, H.F. Brown in Windsor, also stopped growing tobacco, switching instead to vegetables.
“My grandfather and father grew Connecticut shade tobacco and I do miss growing it, but it just didn’t make sense anymore,” said Kathleen Martin, current president of Brown’s Harvest.
They now grow cucumbers, tomatoes and all sorts of berries.
But LaMondia said the idea that tobacco farming is dying in Connecticut is inaccurate.
“It’s still a major crop here. Depending on the year, tens of millions of dollars worth of tobacco are sold,” LaMondia said. “There’s probably about 3,000 acres of tobacco being grown in the valley, so it’s still going strong.”
USDA statistics back up that claim.
Connecticut’s tobacco yield increased significantly from 2017 to 2022, according the most recent data available from the USDA. In 2017, 46 farms covering 2,204 acres produced nearly 3.9 million pounds of tobacco. In 2022, 44 farms covering 3,056 acres produced more than 6 million pounds of tobacco.
But LaMondia said the new “pounds” are all broadleaf. He said at one time, shade tobacco grew on more than 1,000 acres in Connecticut. All of that is now gone, except for Arnold’s small operation.
With Broadleaf, the entire plant is cut at once from the bottom and hung to dry in a barn. It is a much easier crop to cultivate than Connecticut shade and quicker to get to market.
“It’s kind of shifted and moved from shade being king to broadleaf, which is most of the acreage now throughout the valley,” LaMondia said.
Several farmers said they admire Arnold for sticking with tradition and still growing the shade tobacco that first brought notoriety to the area’s farmers.
Arnold does grow about 20 acres of Connecticut Broadleaf just to “hedge,” but as the last man growing Connecticut shade, Arnold thinks he’s fine.
“I realized there was still some market for it, and if I’m the only one growing it, well they’re going to have to buy it from me,” Arnold said. “As long as I can supply them with some quality leaves, they’ll keep coming back to me.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
