My arm hurts. That’s not how Friday morning started. It actually started outside, alongside Patrick Lagreid, some Drew Estate and Altadis U.S.A. employees and Rafael Nodal until about 3 a.m. After a few hours of sleep, Patrick Lagreid was off to visit De Los Reyes and I was off to visit Jose Mendez & Co. After about an hour on the bus we arrived at a farm and were greeted by Siegfried P. Maruschke Méndez and, his father, Siegfried Maruschke Méndez. The son is the company’s current head, the ever-present father is the company’s patriarch and clearly still very much involved in the company’s growing operation. We briefly looked at plants and were given a basic rundown of tobacco. Plant seeds in seedbeds, transfer to farm, water and maintain the crop, harvest from bottom top and then move to barns. Sounds easy, but it’s not, particularly at the scale that this family does it: absolutely massive. An interesting note at this farm was that the company was curing tobacco in two different methods. One was the traditional Dominican method of taking the leaves off the plant one by one, sorting them and then hanging them on a string in the curing barn. The ...
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