Made in the shade: CT tobacco farmers roll with the times

[El Presidente]

Very good read. I would click the link for the full article. 

 

Made in the shade: CT tobacco farmers roll with the times

by Dave AltimariAugust 10, 2025 @ 5:00 am

 

On a recent July morning, Dwight Arnold stood in front of one of his Connecticut shade tobacco fields, the plants shielded from the sun by a white shade cloth, barking orders to the mix of men and local high school kids lying on the ground trying to pluck the lowest leaves on rows of 8- to 10-foot-high plants.

It was the first round of picking for the last man growing Connecticut shade tobacco on his family’s farm — even though the farm is just across the border in Massachusetts.\

For over a century, cigars wrapped in light brown Connecticut shade tobacco have been considered among the best in the world and, as late as the mid-1980s, farmers from Suffield to Windsor were growing thousands of acres of it in what is known as the Upper Connecticut River Valley.

“Then the demand just kind of fell off, and one by one, they just kind of started to fall by the wayside and switched to something else,” Arnold said.

As demand dropped and the pressure to develop the land grew, many Connecticut farmers turned to an alternative: Connecticut Broadleaf.

Connecticut Broadleaf is easier to cultivate and is used as filler tobacco in many brand-name cigars. Experts say you can also grow more of it per acre, as much as 500 pounds more than shade.

But Arnold, whose great-grandfather purchased the Southwick farm in the 1870s, never stopped growing the iconic shade variety.

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