Roll your own: with price support gone up in smoke, the growers co-op is making cigarettes to make a market for its members.

In 1839, a slave in Caswell County discovered a better way to cure tobacco when he stoked a dying blaze and the burst of heat turned the leaf bright yellow. The mild-tasting "bright leaf" made the soils of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain more lucrative for farmers and has helped sustain them since.

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Nearly 170 years later, that baptism of fire has inspired a new brand of rolling tobacco and cigarettes: 1839. Raleigh-based Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corp. created it two years ago--after the federal government snuffed out a decades-old program of price and production controls. The co-op had helped administer the program, buying and storing surplus tobacco until demand increased.

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As the program came to an end, co-op leaders decided against disbanding, opting instead to process tobacco and make cigarettes. "We felt it was an opportunity that could enhance the growers' position in the market," says Tommy Bunn, acting general manager.

In 2004, it spent $26 million to buy a factory--including equipment--in southern Person County from Florida-based Vector Tobacco. It started buying leaf under contract from farmers and making cigarettes under contract to Chesterfield, Mo.-based Premier Manufacturing and Miami-based New Century Tobacco Group. In 2006, it introduced 1839 roll-your-own tobacco, followed a year later by the discount-brand cigarettes. Both are made from a blend of domestic and imported tobacco and sold at convenience stores and specialty shops in the Southeast.

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Any bright leaf left is sold to companies in the U.S. and abroad, where a weak dollar and demand for American flue-cured tobacco has led to lucrative deals in Europe, Turkey, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and China--the co-op's largest export market.

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In its plant, about 400 workers prepare tobacco for sale or manufacture. By hand, they sort leaves and remove stems. Machines chop and grind the leaf, roll cigarettes and put finished products into packages.

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Some of its 850 contract growers sell their entire crop to the co-op, but some also deal with leaf brokers or cigarette makers such as Richmond, Va.-based Philip Morris USA and Winston-Salem-based Reynolds American. Co-op leaders hope to distribute dividends to members but so far have plowed profits back into the business. They won't disclose revenue, most of which comes from contract manufacturing, but co-op assets totaled $387 million at the end of fiscal 2006.

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Manufacturing might seem a risky proposition for an agricultural co-operative, but it's not uncommon. Concord, Mass.-based Welch Foods is an arm of the National Grape Cooperative. La Farge, Wis.-based Organic Valley is a co-op that makes dairy products sold at Harris Teeter and other stores. And before long, another co-op, Knoxville, Tenn.-based Burley Stabilization Corp., plans to make its own brand of cigarettes.

Photography by Steve Exum