When it comes to pipe-tobacco information, we like to provide the full story as we know it, with no facts or facets spared. Today I will be shedding light on some of the struggles in delivering the highest-quality, unique tobacco varietals imaginable. Between tricky farmer-cultivator dynamics and the sociopolitical struggles that make cultivation so difficult in some regions, blenders like Jeremy Reeves of Cornell & Diehl overcome significant challenges to acquire necessary tobaccos. But they make it happen, and the efforts are well worth it given the resulting mixtures these tobacco varietals afford.

Resources Are Few

Though it might come as a surprise, pipe tobacco is not the major market for tobacco farmers around the world. "Other than 31 Farms in St. James Parish, Louisiana, no tobacco farmer that I am aware of is growing their crop thinking that it is going to go into pipe tobacco," says Jeremy. "Literally, 31 Farms is the only tobacco farm that I know of planning for their tobacco to be used in pipe tobacco, specifically in C&D's blends. The vast majority of Perique, outside of the production at 31 Farms, is grown to be sold to Santa Fe to make American Spirit Black and Gray."

This fact applies to more than just Perique. "Oriental is grown because R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris buy Oriental tobacco for use in their cigarettes. For the Virginia that is grown, and most of the Burley that is grown, the case is the same."

Tobacco farmers are primarily concerned about having their leaf sold. "Nobody on the agricultural side of tobacco growing is thinking about pipe tobacco," he says. "Pipe tobacco is just too small for any one farmer to go to the risk, expense, and trouble of growing a crop for that small customer."

The demand for pipe tobacco is far less than the demand for other tobacco products, namely cigarettes and cigars. "Cigar brands are a big player in buying larger quantities, which leads to shortages for pipe tobacco."

Even considering this truth, cigarettes and cigars have been in stark decline in popularity in recent decades. "Mostly farmers are growing tobacco for cigarettes and there are fewer and fewer cigarette smokers every day," says Jeremy. "People are not smoking cigarettes the way they did 30 years ago, or 50 years ago."

Naturally, farmers are recognizing this reduction in demand. "There are fewer people growing tobacco," Jeremy says, "because those farmers are going, 'Well, who am I going to sell it to?' The vast majority of Oriental tobacco, Turkish, for example, is grown because there is a big cigarette company or grouping of cigarette companies that have commissioned those crops, usually through a middleman, or a leaf dealer.

"The dealer maintains the farm relationships," he says, "and the manufacturers tell the dealer what kinds of tobacco they want and the sort of quantities they want. Then the dealer contacts their farmers and commissions those crops."

Certain families of tobacco are harder to cultivate. "There have been times at C&D where getting certain varietals of tobacco was difficult," says Jeremy, "due to issues with tobacco growers who were getting out of the game or laborers in the curing process quitting in large numbers for one reason or another.

"Getting Oriental tobacco is difficult for small producers in particular because it has to be imported from Turkey or Macedonia or Bulgaria or Greece, and there's no cost-efficient way to import without filling a shipping container. For most pipe-tobacco operations, a shipping container of Oriental might be a really long supply because of the quantities that you'd actually use in your blends. It might last you a long time."

The size of Oriental plants makes the price fairly high as well. "The leaves are very small and the growing regions where the tobacco comes from are difficult to farm," says Jeremy. "Very often the yield of the crop is not massive."

It can be a challenge to get the tobacco that blenders require to create their mixtures for pipe use. "We source what we can, when we can." he says, "and when we can, we get as much of it basically as we're able to because it is very feast-or-famine."

Socioeconomic Issues

Beyond the lack of resources, there are social, economic, and environmental implications that make tobacco cultivation all the more challenging.

From difficulties in getting Orientals due to legislation in various countries, including Turkey, that requires that 30% of all tobacco grown by farmers must stay within the country, to struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic right here in the United States, Cornell & Diehl has experienced trials in many ways to receive the top varietals around the world.

"There have been times at C&D where getting Latakia was really difficult," says Jeremy, "partly to do with environmental resources and conditions in the areas where the tobacco was grown before being turned into Latakia, socioeconomic issues, politics around the movement of raw tobacco, and the movement of cured tobacco across borders and the expense involved."

Beyond Latakia, other varietals similarly are difficult to cultivate due to socioeconomic factors and also global issues, such as the recent pandemic that was felt around the world.

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, shipping charges went through the roof, and availability of shipping containers dropped through the basement floor," says Jeremy. "All of a sudden, big cigarette producers that were primarily buying their tobacco from Brazil, Malawi, and Zimbabwe shifted their consumption to U.S.-grown tobacco because they could get it here cheaper than buying it at a cheaper rate from overseas and then paying three times the shipping cost. So they opted in large numbers to just buy up all of the available tobacco here."

This caused issues for Jeremy, even though about 300 million pounds of flue-cured tobacco is grown in the U.S. annually. "There wasn't enough Virginia for us to be able to buy anything for about three years. It's only because I was forward thinking about buying tobacco that we could be using over the next four or five years that we were able to continue producing the blends that call for flue-cured and Burley tobaccos. That's the way I've always done things.

"If we had been buying year on year, we wouldn't have been able to buy any flue-cured or air-cured tobacco from our normal sources during the pandemic for two or three years."

A rise in tobacco production has emerged, despite the drop off in tobacco growth and consumption in other places. According to the University of Bath from their Tobacco Tactics website:

Even considering this growth in these places abroad, when it comes to cultivating Virginias that are grown outside of the United States, such as in Malawi, Africa, and Brazil, these varietals can be hard to get based on the demand and high shipping costs as well. Brazil has the largest flue-cured market in the world, and growers are now producing tobacco for a cheaper price due to cheap labor costs locally.

Even with other places around the world growing more tobacco than in other locations, variability in growing seasons and availability is a common issue that Jeremy has felt. He notes that he mainly buys C&D's flue-cured tobacco from North America, primarily from the U.S. in North Carolina and in Virginia, and strives to get as much Oriental as possible when there are crops that have been successfully grown.

Why Bother?

Crafting tobacco blends is not simple in any part of the process. The challenges they face in sourcing, importing, blending, packaging, and selling can make it difficult for new blending houses to form in an already declining market. It's certainly astounding to consider from Jeremy's first-hand experience.

Given the difficulty, you may be shaking your head and wondering who would go through all this trouble just to cultivate specific varietals from harder-to-reach locations. However, when we consider the resulting blends that these varietals make possible, and our lack of availability in the U.S. to obtain these tobaccos, the effort is well worth it.

"Part of the reason that we bother with importing tobacco from places like Greece, Thailand, or Turkey is because we don't have the conditions anywhere in the United States that can produce that tobacco," says Jeremy. "If we did, we wouldn't bother importing because it's a pain to do so. It's expensive, and it's constantly changing in some of these countries where these tobaccos are grown. The rules are constantly changing because of political differences."

Varietals like Orientals afford a unique flavor and complex presence in blends. For lovers of this leaf, its loss would be sorely felt. So blenders continue to press on and source tobaccos like this and the many other varietals, like Burleys and Virginias, for our favorite blends.

Emerging Growing Regions

Interestingly, experimentation in tobacco growth has sprouted up in new locations around the world to accommodate the expense and unreliable availability of particular tobacco varietals, yet not all of the attempts have resulted in a solid yield.

"A lot of money is spent importing particular tobacco from eastern countries," says Jeremy, "that are regularly difficult to navigate business relationships with because of changes in the political climate.

"R.J. Reynolds in particular has put lots of money over the years into trying to find other areas of the world where they could grow Turkish or Oriental tobacco. In the 1960s, they did a lot of experimentation and spent quite a bit of money on trying to grow Oriental in California, Nevada, and in areas like Bend, Oregon, with sort of similar climates to those places. But they were not able to produce results."

One curious case of experimental growth has resulted in Izmir seed for C&D that has proven to be quite delicious.

"Right now we are using Izmir seed that was actually grown in Thailand, which is pretty cool, and it's delicious," says Jeremy. "I'm really pleased with this leaf. It was from the result of an experiment that was being done to see if there were other places outside of the traditional growing areas where Oriental could be produced."

Oriental tobacco was successfully grown in Thailand, though Jeremy deduces that this was a result of a climate-conditioned environment for the tobacco to flourish.

"That leaf is not going to be widely available. I don't think that this crop was grown outdoors. Just thinking about the climate of Thailand and where Oriental is usually grown, the climates that produce Oriental tobacco are more arid, the air is thinner, the soil is sandier, and there is much less humidity and rain.

"When I think of Thailand, I think of sweltering humidity and a jungle kind of climate. That wouldn't be where I would expect a crop like Oriental would be produced, yet through what I would suspect was some sort of a greenhouse environment, this crop was able to grow."

Though tobacco growth has diminished in certain areas, in places like China, the industry continues to boom with lots of tobacco growth and cultivation.

C&D, similarly, has continued to flourish because of Jeremy Reeves' expertise in cultivating relationships with tobacco farmers, in sourcing the most high-quality tobacco on the market, and innovating with exploratory blends and old favorites for us to delight in, no matter the challenges he faces behind the scenes to get the tobacco we love.

Bibliography

• University of Bath. (2023, May 31). Tobacco Farming. Tobacco Tactics.