LEXINGTON, Ky. — Tobacco farmers have faced adversity over the last several years so often that many have left the business altogether.

For those remaining, there are plenty of challenges in an ever-changing market.

The weather over the last few seasons has presented a set of challenges all its own, especially during the curing part of the season. Dry weather during two of the last three years has created curing nightmares, causing many producers to lose money or leaving them unable to sell at all.

While some things about the market are uncontrollable, University of Kentucky (UK) College of Agriculture specialists have developed a new tool to give farmers every advantage possible to overcome those weather challenges.

“Each year we have good and less favorable periods of weather for curing,” said Bob Pearce, UK extension tobacco specialist. “Overall the natural air-curing in Kentucky and surrounding states produces high-quality burley tobacco, but when weather conditions are challenging, proper management is critical.”

Pearce and John Wilhoit, UK extension agricultural engineer, worked with retired UK Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering faculty George Duncan and Linus Walton, along with UK agricultural meteorologist Tom Priddy and information technology support specialist Wanhong Wang, to create a Burley Curing Advisory website.

Pearce said in addition to the knowledge of those who collaborated on the project, the site will utilize the statewide system of automated weather and climate monitoring stations known as the Kentucky Mesonet system. These stations give real-time conditions for a number of locations all across the state. That weather data, coupled with data compiled by the UK ag experts, help to provide a specific recommendation for what growers should be doing to manage tobacco barns for good curing.

“Every curing barn is going to be different and every situation is going to be a little bit different in terms of when the tobacco was put in, so there’s still going to have to be the growers using their own judgment and their own experience to adjust the recommendations that are made,” Pearce said.

Those judgments include factors like barn location, but when it comes to issues such as prolonged dry spells, the system will pick up on that and create recommendations for farmers. Pearce emphasized those weather conditions can vary greatly from one end of the state to the other.

“My hope is this will really get us to thinking about the things we need to do management-wise before it’s too late,” he said. “The system takes advantage of the fact that we have these weather stations scattered all over the place, so we can make recommendations for different areas of the state.”

Priddy said the Mesonet system has weather stations in nearly 60 Kentucky counties, providing much local data for the advisory site that was not available just a few years ago.

“Users can select their county from a pull-down (website) menu and see the current curing conditions for their area, including the average temperature, relative humidity and wind speed for the past 48 hours and even see the forecast for those same variables for the next 24 hours,” he said.

Wilhoit noted with so much portable technology at farmers’ disposal, this new site may be accessed wherever there is an Internet connection.

“Now, so many farmers have smart phones they can get at something like this at about anytime or anyplace,” he said.

Still, Wilhoit explained tobacco curing is a challenging process and one can only do so much. As tobacco farms have grown in size, producers often need help keeping up with all the different barns in which they have tobacco stored.

“This is just another tool that can make information a little more accessible and help them make management decisions,” he said. “With the advances in computer technology and the weather stations, and automatically generated data that’s so much more available than it was just a few years ago, that’s where the idea came from to put this thing together.”

The advisory site can be accessed at http://weather. uky.edu/burley_curing.html