From: David J Brooks
On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 3:06 PM, John Sessoms <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: David J Brooks
>>
>> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:11 PM, John Sessoms <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> > From: David J Brooks
>>>>
>>>> >>
>>>> >> http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=11005290
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Went out for a drive last Sunday, really crappy day, but, bad weather
>>>> >> makes........:-)
>>>> >>
>>>> >> This is an old farm house, one of the original in the area, i'm
>>>> >> trying
>>>> >> to find the story done on this.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> K10D, D AF 50-200
>>>
>>> >
>>> > Looks like an old style tobacco barn, although I don't think they ever
>>> > grew
>>> > much tobacco in Canada.
>>
>> Ontario had a huge tobacco industry for quite a while, Tillsonburg is
>> one such tobacco town.
>
> Growing it?
Yes. Tobacco put a lot of students through school in the day.
Dave
Learn something new every day. I hadn't thought tobacco was much of a
crop north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But Googling for "tobacco cultivation in Ontario", looks like the
flue-cured process was introduced around 1900, so it may, in fact, just
be an old tobacco barn.
It's kind'a on the wane in NC with the buyout - acreage is no longer
regulated by the Tobacco Stabilization Corporation and prices to farmers
have dropped. Plus the tobacco companies are importing a lot of cheap
foreign tobacco, particularly from China of all places.
Cigarette factories are closed down. There used to be 3 factories in
Durham, NC where I grew up and they paid good, high wages for the time
and place. Now those jobs are gone, and you can really see it in a lot
of neighborhoods.
Get outside of town, and there are still a lot of those old barns
around, mostly in fairly tumble-down condition because there was a big
move to mechanization and bulk curing that was less labor intensive in
the 70s.
Tobacco was hard, nasty work, but it was one of the better paying farm
labor jobs.
At its peak in the late 70s tobacco pre-tax profits averaged $3500/acre
in NC, and even a small quota could make the difference in whether small
farmers in NC could make it.
It's bad for your health, and I'm glad to see the move away from
tobacco, but I'm not sure what's going to replace it to put dollars in
the farmer's pockets, and I think it's going to have a big impact on
family farms.
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