For a number of purposes, including traceability, crop management, experimentation, implementing Good Agricultural Practice (GAP), and for applications such as agro-meteorology and crop insurance, a clear, universally adaptable means of identifying growth stages is very important. The scale described in this document has been developed for tobacco and is based on the extended BBCH-scale* that is universally adopted for uniformly coding phenologically similar growth stages of plants. It covers the full life of the crop from seed germination to harvesting and curing and is applicable to tobacco grown for its leaves as well as that for seed production.

* ‘Growth Stages of Mono- and Dicotyledonous- Plants’, BBCH Monograph, 2nd edition, 2001, ed. Uwe Meier, Federal Biological Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry (2018 edition available from the Julius Kühn-Institute, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants, Germany).