Is no one paying attention to the date on the article??
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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This is some Space Station 13 botany
"Is that wacky tobaccy?" "The wackiest!"
Give me the weed tobacco cigarettes. Roll up spliffs with 1 plant.
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, so not the American domesticated tobacco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_benthamiana
Still tho...
It's the same process to harvest leaves.
I grew up on a tobacco farm, hardly any aspect is mechanized.
To harvest it:
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Put a six foot stick in the ground
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Put a metal spear tip on top.
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Cut plant with hatchet
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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:
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Drive a tractor over the field
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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 appreciate when people have RL experience in a niche topic. Best part of online discussions, thank you for the insight!
Yes, this is basic research, which generally starts with common model organisms that many labs have access to. This increases reproducibility of the early results. The study mentions expression of the relevant genes and proteins in the buds as well, and also calls out one of the pathways in tomato, so perhaps the next step could be to test it in other nightshades and their fruit
Yeah, was just surprised tobacco is a common base for experiments.
And that explains why it's used here, it's never going to be at scale
Tobacco industry funded a huge amount of molecular biology in transgenic tobacco and it ended up being a well understood plant model system to express anything.
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. When "up in a bay" you're standing on the same thing the sticks hang on, so doing the splits for hours on end while doing manual labor.
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 second "bay" and then someone else a couple rows up above the floor. Like 2-3 real stories if we were talking a house. Because the "top" touched the less weight, that's where the kids started lol.
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. Again, this whole time you're doing the splits 10-30 feet off the floor of the barn.
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.
Quick edit:
But it's not just scary. I saw an uncle have a "bay" break, and he fell maybe 20 feet with shit ton of tobacco and pointy sticks, and his leg went thru the floor of the barn, but he didn't fall all the way thru.
He was fine, but all that weight and all those pointing sticks, at any moment something can give from the weight, and consequences could be fatal.
Interesting, thanks.
Tobacco? More like whoa-bacco
it's called tomacco, I need some seeds
Far Cry 6!
Cool.
Cool cool cool.