Cultivation of Tobacco in Sumatra is an 1898 booklet written by Emile Mulder for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA released a number of booklets throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s to educate about tobacco cultivation and help farmers grow better tobacco. You can see the reasoning for the booklet in its ‘Letter of Transmittal’: “There is so much interest taken in the growing of cigar tobaccos in this country at present and so much competition from both Sumatra and Cuba, that it seems important to lay before our tobacco growers all the information possible in regard to the conditions and methods of production in the countries from which the competition is most severely felt.”1
The author surveys the climate and soil conditions of various parts of the island. He discusses the introduction of tobacco into Sumatra – tobacco was grown on the island of Java with good results, but the quality started to diminish. So in 1862 tobacco was brought to Sumatra for cultivation.
Prior to writing this booklet, Emile Mulder spent a number of years running a Sumatran tobacco farm. Because he knew all of the specifics, the booklet dives into those specifics – how much tax did you need to pay, and to whom to run the farm? How should you set up the fields? How does the management system work? When and how should each step of the tobacco cultivation and preparation process be done? It’s all answered here. A lot of it is quite outdated, but a neat dive into the past nonetheless.
At the end of his booklet, Mulder points out that “a very good type of Sumatra tobacco is being successfully raised in some of the counties of Florida.”2 He cautions that the soils in Florida might not allow for the very fine texture of the leaf that is key to good Sumatran cigar tobacco.
Cultivation of Tobacco in Sumatra is in the public domain and can be read for free on the Internet Archive.