I don’t know what scale would be required…

But absolutely wild they’re starting with one of the most labor intensive crops.

Tomatoes are the same family, and waaaaay easier to grow at scale. Seems like it would have been an obvious choice.

But if an acre is an annual supply, it doesn’t matter.

They used an Australian wild tobacco that is widely used in genetic research. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_benthamiana

Still tho…

I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.

To harvest it:

Put a six foot stick in the ground

Put a metal spear tip on top.

Cut plant with hatchet

Impale on stick

After like 6-8 plants, start a new stick.

Then after a couple weeks load it on a wagon by hand, then hang it in a tobacco barn (aka death trap) where you’re a couple stories high doing the splits, and people pass the sticks up to you and you hang and spread them to dry.

Months later you climb back up and bring it all down.

Then manually remove each and every single leaf.

Grade it.

And compress it into bales using hydraulic jacks.

For tomatoes:

Drive a tractor over the field

Dump tomatoes

Like…

I’m just saying if we need a lot, this is t the means for production. If it’s just testing and it’ll end up somewhere else, no worries.

I’m curious, what makes a tobacco barn a death trap? Is it simply the flammability or is there something else?

(Btw I visited such barns in Cuba and it was the best smell I smelled in my life)

So the “sticks” that the tobacco goes on are like 5-6 feet long.

Each “bay” needs to be just wide enough for the stick to hang.

Depending on barn, usually at least one person needs to be up in a “bay”. In my family barn we had one person on the ground, one standing on the first “bay” and then someone else a couple rows up above the floor. Like 2-3 real stories if we were talking a house.

Sometimes your lucky and the bays are made of cut wood, often it’s just a straight up fucking locust tree trunk, that’s not even tied down so it rolls side to side a little

The length of a bay varies, but when there’s not a lot on there, it moves/bounces. When you get far enough down the bay that it stops, it starts to sag and creak from the weight.

It’s so hard to get down/up, you start taking water breaks in the top of the barn.

Where it’s hot as fuck and the air is full of dirt and tobacco dust, but at least you can sit on a beam for two minutes after constantly doing the splits.

Hell of a workout, just not as easy as driving a harvester thru a tomatoe field.