LAUREL COUNTY, Ky. — Under the bright sun, Kevin Cornett slowly drove his tractor Wednesday as a line of tobacco plants marched over his head. Beside him, his brother Brent drove a tractor pulling a trailer on which the yellow-green plants collected.

It’s a process that has turned a lot of heads this tobacco-cutting season, with the Cornett brothers using a new machine called the Kirpy Harvester.

“It was manufactured in France,” Brent Cornett said. “They’ve had it there seven to eight years. Philip-Morris is probably the biggest reason it’s here.”

Rather than relying on manual labor, the Kirpy cuts the plants and, when it does, gashes the stalk with an angled notch. The plants, still upright, then get launched onto a conveyor belt of sorts, which leads them from the field to an adjacent trailer. The notch is perfectly suited for hanging the plant upside down on wire scaffolding the Cornett brothers spent the month of July building. The result is a field of wooden frames carefully strung with cattle wire.

“They thought we were putting in a vineyard,” Cornett said, laughing.

Using the Kirpy, Cornett said, produces purer tobacco.

“Normally,  you would leave it on the field three to four days after cutting to let it dry down,” Cornett explained.

This way, the plants are hung immediately and “the tobacco never touches the ground,” Cornett said.

After the wire scaffolding has been loaded with tobacco plants, it is covered with plastic to allow them to cure, a process that takes about eight weeks. Stripping the leaves takes place at the end of October.

Cornett, a third-generation tobacco farmer with one of the largest farms in the area, said his 80-acre tobacco crop is producing well this year, far better than in last year’s extremely wet summer.

“Tobacco likes hot and dry, like a weed,” he said.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency, there are currently about 20 tobacco producers in Laurel County, compared to nearly 1,000 in 1990. Twenty years ago, the county produced 4.5 million pounds of tobacco, which had dwindled to 1.5 million by 2004. That number is even lower today.

For the past three weeks, the Cornett brothers have been cutting their crop, and are about halfway through the process. Of their 80 acres, 35 acres of the crop will be cut using the Kirpy and hung on scaffolding. The remainder will be stuck and hung in a barn using the traditional method.

Cornett said he is pleased with the Kirpy, which Philip-Morris encourages him to use, so far. Though it is not faster — “It’s actually probably slower than a big crew,”  he said — building scaffolding is cheaper than a barn, and he feels using this technique will ultimately produce a finer product.

Still, while the process has become somewhat mechanized, Cornett has no illusions that his job will get a whole lot easier.

“Growing tobacco is very much labor intensive,” he said.



Staff writer Tara Kaprowy can be reached by e-mail at tkaprowy@sentinel-echo.com.