TOBACCO IN CALIFORNIA. 



CTJLTUBE OF THE PLANT AND CUEING OF 



THE LEAF. 



[WRITTEN FOR THE SACRAMENTO RECORD, BY A PRACTICAL TOBACCO PLANTER.] 



The failures in making tobacco a profitable crop in California bave 

 been due primarily to tbe failure to cure the leaf successfully after tbe 

 crop bad been grown. There are thousands of men in California from 

 all the tobacco-growing States — thousands of them practical planters. 

 During the past twenty years many individuals among these bave em- 

 barked more or less extensively in the enterprise of tobacco planting. 

 There has been no failure in raising the crop — in securing, indeed, a 

 heavy yield. But there has been difficulty in curing the leaf to a mer- 

 chantable quality and condition. The sources of this difficulty have 

 lain, not in the properties of the leaf itself, but in tbe arid, desiccating 

 atmosphere of a California Autumn. This tended to remove from the 

 leaf all its moisture before sufficient time elapsed for the decomposition of 

 the green coloring matter (chlorophyl'), the partial conversion of the 

 starch into gum and sugar — the changes, in short, that in a moister 

 atmosphere take place naturally in the plant after it is cut and before it 

 is dried. These are the changes that constitute "curing," as distin- 

 guished from merely " drying up." The successful culture of tobacco 

 in California required that a method should be worked out that would 

 sufficiently promote these changes among the elements of the leaf, within 

 the comparatively brief period during which it is able to retain sufficient 

 moisture and vitality to admit of their taking place at all. None so well 

 as old planters will perceive that the sole obstacle to successful tobacco 

 culture is encountered after cutting, for none so well as they know the 

 hardiness of the plant and the trusty generosity with which it repays 

 honest and painstaking cultivation. The wide range over which the 

 plant is grown in the United States ought sufficiently to assure even the 

 unsophisticated, that there is nothing in its own nature to exclude it 



35_(agri) 



