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I wonder how profitable. There is a town in SW Ontario, Canada, named Tillsonburg. Up until the 80's, every other farm was a tobacco company, earning the nickn
by ksaj 5y ago
I wonder how profitable.
There is a town in SW Ontario, Canada, named Tillsonburg. Up until the 80's, every other farm was a tobacco company, earning the nickname Tobaccoburg.
Even Stompin' Tom Connors wrote this song about working in Tillsonburg's tobacco fields: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YouShACK-H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YouShACK-H4
(Also, what a lucky URL. They rarely spell actual words.)
Since the 90's, you can drive throughout the town and surrounding area and find it very hard to find a tobacco field anywhere. You still see a lot of the old-style kilns, rarely ever a modern one, and they're nearly always in fields growing anything but tobacco.
Even when there were tobacco fields everywhere, tobacco farmers highly relied on Jamaicans coming in through the Farm Labour Pool in order to make the season profitable. There were farms that didn't use the labour pool, but they were few and far between.
- Scoundreller 5y agoThe government also paid them off to get out of tobacco farming. https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2008/08/01/feds_give_farmers_300m_to_exit_tobacco_industry.html https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2008/08/01/feds_give_fa... Production went from 38m kg in 2005 to 9m kg in 2008, I don't doubt demand dropped by 74%, so someone else picked up the slack/production value and we just import from there. Another supply-focussed war on drugs failure.
- ksaj 5y agoI didn't know about the cigarette smuggling convictions. Quite interesting. Out of the more than $1billion fine, it would be interesting to see how and where the money was allotted. A lot of ex-tobacco farms are now growing sweet potatoes for use in biofuel. I also saw ginseng, and I'm sure there are quite a few other crops they are working on.