At the Oxford Tobacco Research Station, there’s a little more than an acre of tobacco planted each year with one very special purpose. Instead of being destined for market or research trials, the plot is reserved for the N.C. State Fair, where it’s used in the annual tobacco stringing competition and then hung in the fairgrounds’ tobacco barn to cure during the 11 days of the fair.
Among those who work with it, the crop is affectionately called “the Commissioner’s tobacco,” a nod to Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, whose idea it was to dedicate a plot specifically for this tradition.
Station Superintendent Thomas Cobb explained that caring for the field is different from any other.
“This is planted about two and a half weeks later than any of the rest of the tobacco on the station,” Cobb said. “The idea behind that is the longer we can wait to put it in the field, the less environmental factors that play into how long it can hold ‘til the State Fair.”
Superintendant Thomas Cobb talks about the “Commissioner’s tobacco” at the Oxford Tobacco Research Station.
That timing matters because the fair is unusually late in the year for harvesting.
“I would probably argue that the tobacco that goes to the State Fair is some of the last tobacco that’s pulled in the state,” Cobb said. “Keeping this tobacco stable and trying to bring a quality leaf to the tying contest is something that really takes a lot of management.”
To help it hold longer, the staff manages the field with extra care. One example is the tobacco gets a little more fertilizer.
“We don’t want to give it too much that we alter the plant so bad that we don’t have a good representation of what tobacco can look like,” Cobb said. “But we’re trying to give it just a little touch more to maybe make it hold a little later.”
They’ll sometimes even apply foliar fertilizer sprays late in the season to keep the leaves greener for longer and as healthy as possible until fair time.
Like regular tobacco, the cropping/pulling/priming is done in stages – likely going through the field twice to get the bottom leaves off before the third and final pull happens right before the fair begins.
“The last time that we harvest this will be the morning of the day we take it to the State Fair,” Cobb said. “We’ll start priming or pulling it that morning at about 5 a.m. We’ll fill a trailer up, and then we’ll take that full trailer and head to the barn at the fairgrounds.”
Keeping tobacco in the field until mid-October doesn’t come without risk. Cobb said the biggest challenge they have in keeping tobacco that long is the amount of rainfall. The more rain, the more nutrients that get washed out of the crop. Then there’s also a concern about frost in the first part of October.
That threat is real. In 2024, Cobb and his team even prepared to irrigate the field like strawberry growers do when frost threatens.
“We actually pulled pipe and sprinklers through the tobacco with a plan that if we had to, we were going turn on water to basically frost protect the tobacco from the frost so that we could try to keep it ‘til the fair,” he said. “We never had to turn the water on, but the morning we pulled the tobacco for the State Fair was the first morning we got a frost. We were literally priming it as it was frosting on the ground.”
For Cobb, the extra effort is worth it.
“It reminds people that even though there’s less acreage of tobacco grown now in North Carolina than they previously had in decades past, tobacco is still one of the top producing cash crops in North Carolina,” he said. “Tobacco is a big heritage for a lot of people in North Carolina. Not only folks who grew up in agriculture, but even people who maybe didn’t [grow up in agriculture] probably had a relative or a grandpa who was involved in tobacco.
That’s why the acre in Oxford exists – to connect fairgoers with a crop that helped shape North Carolina’s history and economy. As Cobb put it, “At the fairgrounds, the way we’re doing it there, we’re doing it very old school. It kind of helps teach people that this is a crop that is still a big deal to North Carolina. This is where we’ve come from, this is where we are now, and we need to continue to support that industry because it still plays a vital role, in my opinion.”
During the N.C. State Fair, which runs October 16–26 in Raleigh, visitors can catch the sweet aroma of that tobacco curing in the historic barn in Heritage Circle and know it came straight from “the Commissioner’s tobacco” field in Oxford.
