Maryland Tobacco

HUGHESVILLE -- Steven Walter's father and uncles were only boys in those years when they began chopping the trees, pulling out the stumps with horses and hoes, and sawing the timber into boards and beams.Then they tilled the cleared land, built barns and settled into the arduous annual cycle of planting, cutting, hanging, curing and stripping the aromatic four-foot leaves that slowly turn from green to gold.Thus was a tobacco farm built from a forest in the 1930s; and at the age of 36, Walter now keeps the cycle going as he awaits the arrival of the next generation -- his first child, due on the Fourth of July.

Maryland tobacco farmers won't receive about $13 million in payments from cigarette manufacturers under a ruling Friday from the North Carolina Supreme Court. Officials with the Maryland Department of Agriculture said the state had sought to require that Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. honor an agreement to compensate farmers for the declining sales of tobacco expected from a settlement between the tobacco industry and states over the health care costs of smoking.

UPPER MARLBORO -- Not too long ago, Maryland's "Mr. Tobacco" worked out of the Tobacco Experimental Farm, a 200-acre bastion of tobacco research surrounded by bountiful farmland. Now, Dr. Claude McKee's farm is devoted primarily to other crops and under siege by land-hungry subdivisions.The farm's switch from rural tobacco center to suburban crop research facility mirrors the fortunes of Maryland tobacco. Dr. McKee, a research scientist with the University of Maryland who has grown and studied tobacco for four decades, has seen the state's tobacco farmers dwindle in number as its farmland has disappeared and demand for its unique brand of tobacco has declined.

Earl "Buddy" Hance can trace his family to the 1700s when, as he puts it, "They got off the boat at St. Mary's City and began growing tobacco." For more than 250 years, the Hance family and most of its Southern Maryland neighbors labored to meet the growing demand from Europeans hooked on smoking. "We grew tobacco forever, as far back as six or seven generations," he said. But that ended abruptly a few years ago. Hance was one of the more than 800 farmers who decided to take part in a state program that paid them to stop growing tobacco.

Claude G. McKee, a longtime Maryland Cooperative Extension Service tobacco researcher and educator who was considered an international expert on the unique aspects of Maryland tobacco, died Thursday of lung cancer at his North Keys farm in southern Prince George's County. He was 68.Mr. McKee, an agronomist, retired from the University of Maryland's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources in 1995 after nearly 40 years, during which time he had become a familiar figure to Southern Maryland tobacco farmers.

State officials are mustering their forces to halt a new outbreak of a form of business fraud that has plagued one of Maryland's oldest industries since Colonial days.Called "nesting" since George Washington's time, in its most flagrant form today it involves hiding inferior-grade tobacco or other objects in the center of 300-pound baskets of top-dollar leaf being readied for market.The new warning comes as tobacco growers are working in their barns tying the cured leaf into "hands," or bundles, and preparing it for sale at auction next month.

State officials are mustering their forces to halt a new outbreak of a form of business fraud that has plagued one of Maryland's oldest industries since Colonial days.Called "nesting" since George Washington's time, in its most flagrant form today it involves hiding inferior-grade tobacco or other objects in the center of 300-pound baskets of top-dollar leaf being readied for market.The new warning comes as tobacco growers are working in their barns tying the cured leaf into "hands," or bundles, and preparing it for sale at auction next month.

UPPER MARLBORO -- The opening session of the annual Southern Maryland tobacco auction yesterday turned into a power struggle between buyers and sellers, like a pair of cigar-chomping street fighters going at one another.Although the opening round afforded each side the chance to flex its muscles, it left many farmers confused as prices dipped to levels not seen in five years, then bounced back to levels comparable to what farmers received last year.The buyers landed the first blow when they offered prices that one industry official estimated were 20 percent lower than those a year ago.The farmers gathered at Planter's Warehouse were outraged.

UPPER MARLBORO -- The opening session of the annual Southern Maryland tobacco auction yesterday turned into a power struggle between buyers and sellers, like a pair of cigar-chomping street fighters going at one another.Although the opening round afforded each side the chance to flex its muscles, it left many farmers confused as prices dipped to levels not seen in five years, then bounced back to levels comparable to what farmers received last year.The buyers landed the first blow when they offered prices that one industry official estimated were 20 percent lower than those a year ago.The farmers gathered at Planter's Warehouse were outraged.

UPPER MARLBORO -- The annual Southern Maryland tobacco auction opened here yesterday amid concern that the industry is coming under a new threat overseas."

FOR nearly 370 years, tobacco has been more than a crop in Southern Maryland. It has been a way of life. The first European settlers to the region saw the potential of the crop shortly after their ships -- the Ark and the Dove -- landed at St. Clements Island in 1634. They developed a thriving economy around supplying the Old Country's growing demand for smokes. Tobacco was used as currency. The town preacher was paid in tobacco. Tobacco farmers could order a bride from England for 120 pounds of the dried leaf.

DEMOCRATIC government, being driven by diverse forces, often works in contradictory and prodigal ways. But few public programs can beat Maryland and its wacky tobacco policy for mixed motives and dubious outlays. The state sued one part of the cigarette production chain - manufacturers - only to give large amounts of the litigation proceeds to another - tobacco farmers. Politicians want to preserve the state's open space and agricultural heritage. But they're working to wipe out tobacco growing, one of the few ways Maryland farmers can make a decent living.

HUNTINGTOWN -- Sitting in a Rube Goldberg-like contraption attached to the back of a tractor, Courtney Curlett picked up the tender, young tobacco plants and hand-fed them into a machine that dug holes in the soil below, watered the plants and set them in neat rows. The teen-ager was getting a lesson from Bryan Wood, son of tobacco farmer Frank Wood, in how to place the plants in the machine. Helen Marcellas and Sammy Jones -- friends of the Wood family -- worked alongside them in the four-seat planter as it was pulled slowly up and down the dusty field.

LAWYERS ARE supposed to remove the emotions from messy human disputes so they can be settled by the dispassionate rule of law. Except that the lawyers come with their own emotions. And like firefighting buffs who turn out to be secret arsonists, those whose job is to help resolve disagreements sometimes prolong and expand them. That seems to be the unfortunate case with Maryland's tobacco lawsuit. In a nutshell: The state lawyer who hired the lawyer to sue the tobacco companies later sued the lawyer he hired in a fee dispute, hiring another lawyer to represent him. Also, the lawyer the state lawyer hired had hired another lawyer who knew tobacco law, but who later sued the lawyer who hired him for a bigger share of the fee. And the lawyer the state lawyer hired naturally had to hire another lawyer to defend against the lawsuits of the tobacco-expert lawyer and the state lawyer.

UPPER MARLBORO -- Southern Maryland tobacco farmers got a hint yesterday of what their checking accounts are going to look like this year. Hundreds of growers -- bundled in layers of flannel shirts and sweaters to ward off a damp morning chill -- showed up at the opening session of the annual leaf auction at Planter's Warehouse Inc. to get a feel for how much they will earn from another drought-damaged crop, this the one harvested in the fall. Nobody was celebrating, but there was less grumbling about prices this year than last.

THE YEAR is 2025. At the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Building, oncologists meet with patients, review medical histories, analyze lab results and recommend treatment. The center is full, yet one vital factor is fundamentally different from when the building opened at the turn of the century: the patients. They are, for the most part, much less sick -- and enjoy a far better prognosis -- than the patients of 25 years before. Many of them look perfectly healthy.

Maryland tobacco farmers won't receive about $13 million in payments from cigarette manufacturers under a ruling Friday from the North Carolina Supreme Court. Officials with the Maryland Department of Agriculture said the state had sought to require that Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. honor an agreement to compensate farmers for the declining sales of tobacco expected from a settlement between the tobacco industry and states over the health care costs of smoking.

UPPER MARLBORO -- Facing their first deficit in memory, Southern Maryland tobacco growers renewed their plea yesterday for financial assistance from the state.Farmers say higher cigarette taxes and other government efforts to curtail smoking have caused the sharp drop in the price domestic tobacco companies are willing to pay this year."We grow a legal crop and I don't feel that we should be punished for doing it," Steven H. Walter, a 37-year-old tobacco farmer from Hughesville, said as he leaned on a basket of Maryland Type 32 leaf on the floor at Planter's Tobacco Warehouse here.

Tobacco funds for children, not farmersRecently, many articles in the media have discussed aid to Maryland tobacco farmers from the national tobacco settlement. It should be noted that approximately half of the more than 700 "tobacco" farmers in Maryland have other jobs and simply grow tobacco on the side for additional income.Most people, including Gov. Parris N. Glendening, are sympathetic to the plight of the real tobacco farmer.The governor is willing to allocate 5 percent of the settlement funds to help them transfer to other crops or buy their land.

UPPER MARLBORO -- Facing their first deficit in memory, Southern Maryland tobacco growers renewed their plea yesterday for financial assistance from the state.Farmers say higher cigarette taxes and other government efforts to curtail smoking have caused the sharp drop in the price domestic tobacco companies are willing to pay this year."We grow a legal crop and I don't feel that we should be punished for doing it," Steven H. Walter, a 37-year-old tobacco farmer from Hughesville, said as he leaned on a basket of Maryland Type 32 leaf on the floor at Planter's Tobacco Warehouse here.