(09-01-2023, 05:27 AM)p358 Wrote: When the big tobacco industry is growing tobacco, the plants are sprayed with various agents to control insect pests and mold and such like.
It is the chemicals in these sprays that cause cancer and such like. That is why in many countries ( Australia is one) it is illegal to grow this plant in your back yard, all under the guise of taxes.
Now the truth is coming out a little bit at a time.
P
I don't have much trouble from insect pests with this variety of tobacco I'm growing now - it's got between 3 and 9 times the nicotine of commercial tobacco, and nicotine is one of the things they make bug sprays out of - and so no real need to spray it. Some folks make bug juice FROM it. Blue mold and tobacco mosaic virus are threats, but not bugs.
Back when commercial tobacco was king around here, about the only bugs that would attack it were horn-worms. We never sprayed for them, but instead would go through the fields every so often and hunt them down, picking them off by hand. Then the government came in, did away with "tobacco allotments" and bought those allotments out from the farmers, and folks stopped growing tobacco here. A couple years ago, I took a drive through the old haunts that I frequented, and saw no tobacco growing there at all - all of the former tobacco fields are now planted in corn, if they are planted in anything at all.
Tobacco companies now contract with a very few farmers to grow larger commerical fields, independent of the controls that the allotments provided, and I'm sure those contracts specify what chemicals have to be sprayed on the tobacco to keep it looking pretty for the market. I'm not sure the commercial tobacco folks are smoking now even has the same mix of nasties it had just 20 years ago, now that tobacco companies have been given the green light to control the mix.
It's a damned shame that Australians have to put up with government interference in a private grow. We have no such interference here now. In the US, anyone can grow it, BUT since the allotments went away, the price bottomed out and it's not a viable enterprise to grow it commercially unless you already have a contract with a tobacco company., so all of it grown by small-holders is just for personal use, like the tobacco I grow. But it ain't illegal - yet.
Australia has it's own native species of tobacco that grows wild. Pretty rough stuff, from what I'm told. I've always wondered just how Australia got it's own native species considering that tobacco all originated in South America. it was already growing there when Captain Cook first graced Australian shores, and it's a curiosity just how that happened - it had already been growing there long enough to differentiate itself from any other tobacco species.
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