BELLEVIEW BOTTOMS, Ky.
- The green and yellow spots on the tobacco hanging in a Boone County barn tell farmer Randy Rector all he needs to know about his crop.
''It's not ready,'' said Mr. Rector, who has about half of the burley tobacco he grew this year - about 3,000 pounds - to sell at one of Kentucky's tobacco markets, which are huge warehouses in cities such as Carrollton, Maysville, Lexington, Shelbyville and Cynthiana.
''It's just not curing up right this year. I hope it will be ready in a week or two, but what I need is more time.''
More time is just what Kentucky's tobacco growers got last week when U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman announced that burley tobacco markets here and in eight other states would remain open longer this year so the burley would have time to cure.
Weather rules
''The wet weather we had in the spring made just about everybody late this year,'' said Boone County grower Dan Slayback, who raised about 35,000 pounds of tobacco this year on his Stevens Road farm. ''I was able to get my tobacco out of the barn and I've already sold it, but a lot of people still have a lot, if not most, of their tobacco in the barn.''
When burley tobacco auctions closed for the Christmas break on Dec. 18, farmers across the eight-state burley belt had sold about 20 million pounds less than they had by the same time last year, according to federal officials.
George Duncan of the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture said the chemical process that changes the color of burley leaves from yellow and green to a deep dark brown requires medium humidity levels and warmth of 50 to 60 degrees or higher.
''(But) the late harvest this year and cooler-than-normal weather have caused burley on the farm to cure more slowly,'' Mr. Duncan said late last week.
Keeping the markets open longer will give the tobacco time to properly cure, said Danny McKinney, chief executive officer of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association in Lexington.
Uncured, unwanted
Farmers who try to sell burley before it is ready may not find a buyer from either the tobacco companies or the federal government, which will buy tobacco the companies do not purchase, provided it has fully cured.
''Baling this tobacco too soon is the worst thing a farmer can do,'' Mr. McKinney said. ''Be patient. Let it hang until it cures.'' Burley markets opened Nov. 24, closed for the Christmas break and were scheduled to reopen Jan. 5.
Those markets will now reopen Jan. 12 and instead of closing Feb. 26, they will remain open until the first or second week of March. ''Growers with this late tobacco should leave it hanging in the barn,'' said Henry West, president of the Council for Burley Tobacco. ''That's the solution.''
Tobacco farming, coupled with tobacco processing, accounts for 5.7 percent of the state's economy, or about $1 billion annually. Last year Kentucky farmers sold nearly 400 million pounds of burley - a brown, leafy, sweet-smelling tobacco that is considered one of the finest types of tobacco grown in the world.
Burley is grown in all but one of Kentucky's 120 counties, Pike County in Eastern Kentucky's coal fields, and provides income to about 60,000 families across the state.
About 15 million pounds was grown last year in the Northern Kentucky counties of Boone, Kenton, Campbell, Pendleton, Gallatin and Grant.
While it was the spring rains and flooding that kept farmers from planting on time this year, Mr. Slayback fears the opposite for next growing season.
''The way farming and weather people are talking we are going to have one of the driest summers on record next year,'' he said. ''People without irrigation systems to water their plants will be in a bad way.''
