Tobacco Asia

Volume 19, Number 1

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56 tobaccoasia "The reality is that we had a big crop with a high yield. Quite a bit is still out there. But we have a world oversupply. Most dealers have tobacco 'on the shelf' and it is not moving very well. It is a very, very slow market right now." By mid-February, most companies appeared to have bought all or nearly all the burley they had contracted for. "I don't think any of the companies – including us – are buying pounds beyond contract," he says. "If they did, it would be at some second tier of pricing. Some will certainly be carried over on the farm." His glum assessment: Burley contractings for 2015 could conceivably be down as much as 50% from last year. There was some interest among farmers in planting without a contract and taking a chance that they could sell it at auction or to independent dealers. But Pratt counseled against that tactic. "That would be like betting your money on the horses," he said. "A market like this is not the kind where it pays to take a chance. I absolutely would not recommend it." An Off Year But Not Far Off? In the last two years, farmers had engaged in a frenzy of machinery buying at the Southern Farm Show in Raleigh, NC, where nearly every piece of leaf-producing ma- chinery can be obtained. But this season, the shrinking contracting volumes lead many farmers to window shop rather than buy aggressively. But the farmers who visited the exhibit of MarCo Mfg. of Bennettsville, SC, were nevertheless looking for ways to improve their operations. "The frame of mind of the farmers who stopped by was better than I thought it would be," said Tom Pharr, chief executive of MarCo, which specializes in flue-cured harvesters and other machinery. "There was some serious thinking going on." Pharr wasn't expecting big things in tobacco machinery sales this year but was not all that pessimistic. "I fully expect 2015 to be an off year, but I don't expect it to be far off," he said. Steve Pratt of Kentucky: "It is a very, very slow market right now."

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