Welcome to My Village

Village of Smoke

(Tegalrejo, Ngadirejo, Temanggung, Jawa Tengah)

       This harvest season, the tobacco farmers of Temanggung have reason to rejoice, because their crop is excellent and bringing a better price.
"Kressh… kressh… kressh..."
         The gobang slicing the tobacco leaves made a crisp sound that morning. Three men, each sitting on a wooden bench in the living room of a house, were racing to slice tobacco leaves, and there were still huge piles in the room behind them. They would take ten tobacco leaves that had turned yellow after three days and nights of storage, roll them up, cut the wad in half, then insert the two sections into a wooden tool, which resembles a tiny wooden guillotine. With a little pressure from the left hand, the pile of leaves is cut with gobang along its breadth, and the shredded leaves fall onto the floor.
        Their accuracy in shredding the leaves was truly impressive; each shred is, on average, only 2 millimeters wide. "If they're too wide, they take too long to dry," explained Bukhori, one of the shredders. "The aim is to have the tobacco that's shredded in the morning dry by later this afternoon."
        Now and then, Bukhori and his two colleagues would stop to sharpen the gobang with a whetstone. The gobang has an interesting shape, much like a meat cleaver. "Gobang vary in price," Bukhori commented. "Mine here was Rp 100,000, but some cost up to Rp 250,000." I hefted it; it was pretty heavy, around a kilogram.
        Another man was arranging the shredded tobacco leaves, which reminded me of noodles, spreading them out on the floor, then sprinkling fine powdered sugar onto them. At other places, a thin sugar syrup is sprayed onto the tobacco with a nozzle. Tobacco farmers mix sugar into their tobacco to achieve a dark brown color and to increase the weight.
        Four women in the front yard were taking turns gathering the sugared tobacco and arranging it on rigen, 1x2-meter woven bamboo tobacco drying trays. The arrangement is unusual: each rigen is divided into six rows of shredded tobacco, three of which contain shorter shreds from the tips and bases of the leaves, while the other three rows are longer shreds. After the shredded tobacco has been sun-dried for a day, left overnight, then aired briefly the next afternoon, each row of short shreds is combined with a row of long shreds. The resulting three rows are then rolled by hand into rolls of tobacco, packed in baskets and tied up; they are then ready to be taken to the tobacco warehouse.
       These activities at Bukhori's home in Gandu Wetan village, Ngadirejo district, Temanggung regency, Central Java that morning were just a small part of the tobacco business chain in Temanggung, and this was by no means the only village where they were busy harvesting tobacco. Other villages in Ngadirejo district, which lies at the foot of Gunung (Mount) Sundoro, were harvesting as well: Tegalrejo, Jumprit, Pringapus, as were the villages in the mountain valleys, which reach toward Wonosobo regency. August is the harvest season for the tobacco plantations on the slopes of Gunung Sundoro and Gunung Perahu; September is the tobacco harvest season in the areas on the slopes of Gunung Sumbing, southeast of Gunung Sundoro.
        In the yard of nearly every house, I saw people shredding tobacco leaves, sun-drying the shredded leaves, and rolling and packing the dried tobacco. I also saw tobacco drying along the village roads, and even along the edges of the main roads, emanating its special aroma. Meanwhile, tobacco plants not yet harvested were waving to us from the fields everywhere we went.
        On the main road of Pringapus village, a few kilometers southwest of Gandu Wetan, at 11 AM I saw local residents turning over tobacco leaves they had been drying in the sun since morning. The method for doing this is simple but ingenious. Two people place an empty rigen on top of one that is full of drying tobacco; they then invert them so that the contents are transferred into the new rigen.
Any tobacco sticking to the old rigen is knocked out using a wooden device. "Yes, this is the time of day when people turn over the tobacco they are drying," explained Bukhori and Budi, who were taking me around by motorbike. We had to drive slowly, because much of the road surface was being used for drying tobacco. Most of the shredded tobacco, which was originally yellow, was now turning brown and emitting a typical tobacco smell.
        To the west of the village, which has a direct view of Gunung Sundoro rising into the sky, is a great expanse of fertile, smallholder-owned tobacco plantations. A few people were working in the fields, weeding or harvesting. The hands and clothes of those who were picking the leaves were dirty and sticky from the resin that naturally coats the surface of the tobacco leaves. The gathered leaves were either loaded into bamboo baskets and carried off on shoulder-poles, or packed in gunny sacks and taken away by motorbike.
       Bukhori explained that the tobacco is harvested in stages. The first leaves picked are the lowest ones, near the soil. This first crop is usually not of very high quality. Around a week later, they harvest the leaves a bit higher; a week after that is the third harvest, of leaves still higher up, in the middle of the plants; and finally, they harvest the topmost leaves. "So the entire harvest takes around a month. Afterwards, the plants are cut down and replaced with other plants, such as rice or corn. Around April or May next year, the fields are planted again with tobacco seeds, and the plants are harvested in August and September."
        Tobacco grown on mountain slopes, called tembakau tegalan, is, according to Bukhori, of better quality than the sawahan tobacco grown in fields in lower areas such as Gandu Wetan. "Tegalan tobacco can reach totol E, whereas the best sawahan can achieve is totol D."
        Totol is the term used to differentiate the different grades of tobacco, which is assessed on three criteria: color, aroma, and the texture of the tobacco when held in the fist. Totol A is the lowest grade, characterized by dry tobacco with a yellowish green color, while the finest grade, totol F, is dark brown. "The price for totol A tobacco is currently around Rp 20,000 per kilo. The prices get higher for each grade, from B, C, D, and E up to totol F, which is usually referred to as srintil," explained Bukhori, who is also a village government official in Gandu Wetan. "On average, each grade brings around Rp 7.500 more than the grade below it per kilogram of dry tobacco."
        Near evening, we visited Tegalrejo village, not far from the Jumprit holy water spring that receives so many visitors around the Buddhist festival of Waisak. On instructions from Kusriyati, the Tegalrejo village head, his assistant took us to visit several local homes. Unlike in Gandu Wetan, the residents of Tegalrejo, who are nearly all tobacco farmers, shred their tobacco at night, so they can leave it in the yard to dry in the morning. Though it gets cold at night, nearly every house if full of people shredding and rolling tobacco leaves. As well as cutting the leaves manually with a gobang, some people use more modern machinery. The dried and rolled tobacco is placed in bamboo baskets with a base of dry banana leaves. They do not produce these baskets themselves, but instead purchase them in Ngadirejo Market for Rp 60,000 to Rp 100,000 apiece.
       To keep the workers awake, two items are always available in every house: strong coffee, and the works for rolling traditional cigarettes, consisting of tobacco packed in a container made of woven pandan leaves, a plastic bag of cloves, cigarette papers, and matches. Though the tobacco they produce is bought up by Indonesia's major cigarette producers – Gudang Garam, Djarum, Bentoel, and so on – the local people prefer to blend and roll their own, because it's more satisfying, not to mention cheaper. Since I don't smoke, I tried this home-rolled blend just once, and had to stop because it sent me into a coughing fit. Instead, I drank many servings of coffee, out of respect for the host, and that set my head pounding as well.
        While it was quite interesting seeing this stage of the tobacco preparation process, before this the farmers have to wait at least 100 days for tobacco plants of the genjah type to be ready for harvest, and a month longer than that for the kemloko variety. The maintenance during the growing season is quite time-consuming and cost-intensive, as several new varieties of agricultural pests have recently emerged that can damage growing tobacco leaves.
        One is the rengit, a leaf gnat that causes red bumps on the leaves. There's also the putur sawang, a microscopic creature that damages the leaves from the inside out, making them white and full of holes. Every day, the farmers also have to prune the plants, picking off any new sprouts that could turn into branches, to prevent them from competing with the main stalks that produce the tobacco leaves to be harvested. Unpredictable weather, such as unseasonable heavy rains, can also damage or impair the quality of the tobacco crop.
        Another problem the farmers complain about is the determination of the weight of the baskets, which is done unilaterally by the tengkulak, middlemen between the farmers and the cigarette factories. The tengkulak often take off too much for the weight of the baskets. "For example, we believe the baskets weigh 5 kg on average, so if you weigh the tobacco and the basket together and the weight is 40 kg, that means the net weight of the tobacco itself is 35 kg. But the tengkulak typically claim that the basket weighs 8 kg, giving a net weight of only 32 kg. So the tengkulak are making a big profit by setting the basket weight themselves," said Setyobudi, village head of Gandu Wetan.
       Luckily, the tobacco farmers have reason to be happy this year, because their tobacco is bringing very high prices. This year's growing season has been quite dry, with almost no rain, so the quality is better than last year. Furthermore, many farmers assumed that the weather would be bad this year as well, and planted other crops instead, so overall tobacco production is down this year; and as the law of supply and demand dictates, the price is up.
This will also affect the incomes of farm workers, such as most of the residents of Gandu Wetan. Since they own no land, they earn their wages by maintaining the farmers' plants or shredding and drying the harvested leaves: Rp 7.500 a day. With the higher prices for tobacco, they too hope to earn a bit more this year.
        Temanggung is 3-hour ride from Yogyakarta or Semarang. Garuda Indonesia flies 63 times a week to both cities.