Meeker County Tobacco Farms

By Bill Ward

Meeker County is known for many important and slightly unique products including seed corn, ergot, chickens (Red Roosters) and the more typical dairy, corn and soybeans. One product not so well known is tobacco.

While tobacco is historically a southern crop, there was a period in the early half of the twentieth century where northern Meeker County, along with several other central Minnesota counties, were producing a large crop of a tobacco variety called “Burley,” a brown leafed sweet tobacco. By 1931 area producers harvested just short of three million pounds, most to be shipped off to southern processors. Some was also used in Minnesota cigar shops, most located around the St. Cloud area.

Tobacco was a very profitable crop with per acre earnings many times that of other traditional crops. However, the labor required was excessive, limiting the acres that could be planted to about five per farm. Tobacco growing was also limited to those farmers who had access to cheap labor. In most cases that meant their children.

The annual process included caring for and germinating the seeds, nurturing young seedlings indoors, hand planting seedlings in the field, meticulously cultivating and weeding the fields, managing insects, topping the mature plants and shoots to encourage leaf growth, and finally cutting the plants and hauling them in from the field. Once harvested these leaves of about 1.5 to 2 feet in length were hung to dry in a drying barn for several months.

Most of the crop was disappearing by the middle of the twentieth century but a few farmers held on into the early 1980s. Today tobacco is yet another piece of history, with barely a memory left of the tobacco business of central Minnesota.

(Research for this article provided by Brent Schacherer.)