No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 345 



notice sort of a mottled appearance. You will see a green little spot 

 ■with more green. It gets a mottled appearance and if you take 

 hold of it, it feels like leather, aud then your tobacco is ripe aud 

 ready to cut. At the same time when the leaf is ripe and you turn 

 it over between the tinger and thumb it will crack, aud you can be 

 sure that your crop is ripe. It has come to the stage where it is 

 going to cure up with better coloring and weight. 



Before we come to the harvesting 1 better mention a little about 

 the selection of the seed plants. There is one mistake that the far- 

 mers have made in this section as well as in other sections, and that 

 is the careless, haphazzard way in which they select the seed plants. 

 Usually they let a half dozen stalks stand for seed. They don't 

 appreciate they should have the best stalks in the field for next 

 year's crop. The proper thing to do would be when topping to pick 

 out the seed stalks and look for certain qualities — I am not going 

 into breeding work — but one of them is the number of leaves on the 

 plant. Many of our farmers have strains that will produce twelve 

 or even fourteen leaves. By counting the leaves they will be sur- 

 prised to find the difference. Here is a plant that has fourteen 

 leaves and here is one that has sixteen leaves. If this plant here 

 has enough vitality to develop sixteen leaves next year where this has 

 fourteen, it will mean tAvo leaves more on each plant. That will mean 

 quite a few pounds more in the aggregate. This type here has 

 eighteen leaves. This is, however, a good strain or type, but it was 

 not taken right out of the field, commercially grown. It is out of an 

 experimental crojj. But the point I want to make is that the farmer 

 should pay more more attention to the selection of the seed than he 

 does. He thinks that is an easy matter and pays no attention to it. 



After the crop has become ripe they begin to harvest. The stalk 

 it cut off at the ground with a pair of long handled shears. After 

 it is cut off it is allowed to lie on the ground for an hour or more 

 to become wilted. It is then picked up and speared upon lath. 

 Tobacco lath are four feet in length and a little heavier than the 

 sort used for building. On the end of the lath we put an iron 

 spear. The iron point is forced through here. About five or six of 

 these stalks are strung upon the lath and then it is taken to the 

 curing barn. The curing process takes eight to ten weeks in our 

 climate on this kind of tobacco. There is a thinner tobacco that 

 cures more rapidly. When this plant is cut it is very heavy. A 

 lath with six stalks like that on is as much as one man can handle, 

 and work all day handling. Now then practically all that moisture 

 must go out of the stalk by evaporation in the curing barn. The 

 curing barn must be well supplied with ventilators in order to 

 keep the air moving and carry out tons of water held in there in that 

 green crop. Curing is not simpl}^ the drying out of all moisture. 

 It is the general impression that curing is simply a drying process. 

 It is not. When this plant is cut off at the ground the supply of 

 nourishment is cut oft" and that plant starves to death. Now if that 

 tobacco lays in the sun too long and becomes scorched or sunburnt 

 it will not cure u]), but always stay green in color. Rapid chemical 

 changes take place in the leaf in curing. The last of the crop is 

 harvested just before frost. Sometimes we get caught with the frost. 

 Frost will ruin a crop of tobacco. It is another thing that the 

 growers must watch out for. There is perhaps a worse thing that the 



