A Whiff of Tobacco Fungus Crops Up in Connecticut

For the first time in 20 years, one of the world’s richest cigar tobacco growing regions was touched by a fast-moving fungus called blue mold last summer.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated the loss at 16% of the crop, or 400,000 pounds of tobacco. The delicate wrapper leaves are one of the most expensive crops in the world to grow--with costs running up to $25,000 an acre--and one of the most lucrative.

Louis Klimoski of Hadley, who has been growing tobacco here for most of his 80 years, said he has heard of some growers getting two and three times last year’s prices of nearly $5 a pound for early undamaged broadleaf. Prime shade tobacco went for nearly 10 times that last fall.

“No one has offered me that,” Klimoski said. “But I think that, when you get down to it, there was more scare than mold.”

Still, with big fancy double coronas and Churchills pushing a growing craze for premium cigars among well-heeled 30-somethings, any hint of trouble in the valley can send a shudder through the industry.

The 65 square miles from northern Connecticut into western Massachusetts are to the cigar business what some French valleys are to wine.

The only places in the world--each with its own special flavor--where the delicate, wrapper leaf that gives the taste to the world’s finest cigars is grown are Cuba, the Cameroon, Ecuador and the Connecticut Valley. And the debate is brisk among aficionados as to whether Cuba or the Connecticut Valley is primo.

With the upsurge in smokers willing to pay $5 to $30 for a cigar, more tobacco was grown in the valley this summer than in nearly a generation. Yet it amounted to less than 2,500 acres. Only a fraction of that was for the highly prized shade tobacco.

“It will all sell,” said John Howell of the University of Massachusetts Extension Service. “But whether it will bring the top price that everyone was expecting for prime wrapper will depend on the damage.”

The fuzzy, blue fungus, which thrives in wet, humid conditions and is spread primarily by air, is no stranger to the nation’s other tobacco growing regions. Native to Australia, it was accidentally introduced into the South, where filler tobacco is grown, in 1921.

But it withers in baking heat and is killed by winter cold. Even in years that the winds bring the deadly spores into the valley from Virginia and North Carolina, they typically don’t arrive until the heat of late summer renders them impotent.

This year the spores appeared at the worst possible time--early July--when the weather was cool and damp, Rathier said. And the harvest was too close to use protective fungicides, which cannot be applied in the last weeks before picking.

The only other time the valley was brushed by the fungus was in 1979, and then it showed up in late July when picking was already well underway, he said.

The source is uncertain, but agriculture officials say they suspect an infestation in Pennsylvania, where some other types of tobacco are grown, may have brought it north to New England quicker. Wild and ornamental tobacco have been ruled out, he said.

“We are talking more than double the demand and double the tobacco,” said Klimoski, whose family has been raising tobacco for three generations. “And no cooperation from the Lord.”