Whether `stringing’ or `looping,’ tobacco is the tie that binds many North Carolina farm families

(AP) — When Sophie Sunday told her schoolmates she was taking off halfway through the school day, they couldn’t wait to find out why. “`I’m going to loop tobacco at the fair,’” the seventh grader told them. “And they’re, like, `What?’ They don’t have a clue.” To be fair, most people don’t.

At 12, Sophie was the youngest contestant in the North Carolina State Fair’s annual tobacco stringing contest, which pays homage to a way of life that was already largely past when her parents were kids. Traditionally, tobacco was harvested by hand, hung in a log barn and cured to a golden-brown with a wood fire that had to be stoked day and night. But before it could go into the barn, the green tobacco had to be strung on long wooden sticks.

What you called this practice depended on what part of the state you lived in. Because the fairgrounds are in the capital, Raleigh, they call it a stringing contest. “Where I grew up, in the middle of the state, we call it stringing,” said Pat Short, superintendent of the fair’s Heritage Circle.

“But down east, in the eastern part of the state, they call it looping tobacco.” Today, North Carolina’s flue-cured tobacco crop is harvested mostly by machine and packed tightly into natural gas-heated metal bulk barns that look more like shipping containers. It’s a different world from when 97-year-old Ruth Coats, the oldest contestant, worked her family’s tobacco near the Virginia border. Once the state’s largest cash crop, tobacco was the beating heart of many family farms.

Tobacco “allotments” — the rights to grow it — were hereditary. “It was good, hard work, but it made you much stronger,” she said with a giggle. “A lot of memories of my family and friends.” Teams like The Tie Masters and Mule Stringers compete Although North Carolina remains the nation’s No.

1 tobacco producer, the leaf has fallen to the state’s third most valuable cash crop, behind corn and soybeans. Growers produced more than 248 million pounds (112,490,907 kilograms) last year, valued at nearly $546 million, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture. Most tobacco ends up in smoking products.