RAFI's Tobacco Farmer Survey Results

Abstract

Thank you all for coming back together, and thank you to everyone for putting this conference together. I am going to talk a little bit about the tobacco farmer survey that RAFI has conducted in cooperation with Wake Forest University. We have been conducting this survey over a several-year period. In 1997 we started interviewing 1,200 tobacco farmers in fourteen North Carolina counties, which are the top producing flue-cured tobacco counties in Eastern North Carolina. The survey asked farmers about their family situation, agricultural production, activities to cope with changes in the tobacco industry, and attitudes about the future of the industry and their options. We interviewed the same farmers again in 1999, and we just completed, in 2001, a third survey that tried to look at the changes in what farmers are doing and how they see the future, in order to get some sense of what would be helpful to them. The 2001 survey includes those who were farming tobacco in 1997 but had gotten out of tobacco by 2001. Nearly one in five of the tobacco farmers surveyed in 1997 are no longer farming tobacco.