WILSON COUNTY, N.C. — The end of summer marks the end of tobacco harvest in North Carolina as cooler temperatures chase off the summertime sun and usher in winter crops.

What You Need To Know

  • Tobacco is still a cash crop in North Carolina

  • The final pass of harvest takes place in late summer

  • The price of farming means consolidation and bigger farm operations

The end of tobacco harvest looks quite different from the beginning, the first two passes during harvest only take four to five leaves off each plant, but the final pass takes the stalk and upper leaves — the parts of tobacco with the highest value.

Brooks Barnes holds a leaf showing signs of being ready to harvest, crinkled with burnt edges. (Spectrum News 1/Rachel Boyd)

“The leaves are thicker, they’re longer, they’re heavier,” said Brooks Barnes, a tobacco farmer in Wilson County. “The top of the stalk is the bread and butter of the tobacco crop.”

According to the N.C. Department of Agriculture one major difference in the tobacco industry each year is the consolidation of farmland with tobacco farms in our state dropping from 8,000 in 2002 to less than 1,300 today. To put that number in perspective, there were 150,000 tobacco farms in North Carolina in 1954.

“The more often that you plant tobacco, the more susceptible you are to the gaining disease, which creates yield loss,” Barnes said. “That's why we plant all these other crops. Soybeans and corn and wheat and cotton, it can be profitable, but it's not something I can depend on. I can depend on this tobacco crop year in and year out.”

On the final pass of harvest, the machine takes the entire stalk and remaining leaves of the tobacco plant. (Spectrum News 1/Rachel Boyd)

Another part of the reason for the decline is the amount of capital it takes to be a farmer these days.

“I've got $4,000 an acre in it, and I've got to get every bit of that back before I’ve made a cent,” Barnes said. 

As the number of farms has declined, the acreage each farmer is planting has gone up. That’s never more evident than at the end of harvest when farmers are clearing their fields.

“I can remember when Dad didn't have but 25 or 30 acres of tobacco, that was a long, long time ago,” Barnes said. “When I graduated college, he had about 70 acres and now we're about 350.”

The N.C. Department of Agriculture says farmers like Barnes harvested more than 252 million pounds of tobacco in 2021, and although that number is staggering, our state churned out three times that amount — over 756 million pounds — in 1981.

“It is still the cash crop on my farm,” Barnes said.