John Fraser Hart

Turmoil in tobaccoland

Tobacco was the first major commercial crop produced in the United States. The colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, were exporting tobacco to England six years before the Pilgrims stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock, and for nearly four centuries the golden leaf has been one of the nations leading cash crops. The golden leaf is no longer quite so golden, however, because tobacco farmers in the United States have been under ever-increasing stress since 1964, when the Surgeon General issued the first report that lung cancer may be linked to cigarette smoking. This stress has been especially severe in the Carolinas and Virginia, which produce nearly half of the nations cigarette tobacco. Tobacco farmers in this area have cast about for alternative agricultural enterprises, but they have been handicapped because no other field crop produces even close to the same gross return per acre as tobacco. In 1992, for example, the average gross value of an acre of tobacco was

Our changing cities

3,223; of cotton,

SPECIALTY CROPLAND IN CALIFORNIA

418; of corn,

Cosmic Commons: Contact and Community

210; and of soybeans,

The Metempsychosis of King Cotton

185 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1994e, 370, 380). Moreover, any new farming enterprise requires expensive new infrastructural investment in facilities for production, processing, and marketing. Traditionally tobacco farms were small, because the crop required such prodigious amounts of intensive hand labor that a family could handle no more than five to seven acres, and even then they might have to hire additional help at the busiest times of the year. As late as 1950, however, a farm of thirty tillable acres with five to seven acres of tobacco could provide a reasonable livelihood for a family. Tobacco-producing areas thus supported the greatest densities of farm population and the smallest farms in the United States. The farmers grew tobacco in small patches that rarely occupied as much as 10 percent of any farm or county. These patches were intricately intermingled with patches of other crops, pasture, woodland, and swamp. Most tobacco farms have been so small that their operators could not afford to consider any alternative agricultural enterprise, even if one were available, and tobacco farmers have dung tenaciously to the crop that has been their staple and their mainstay. The principal exceptions have been the flue-cured tobacco-producing districts of eastern North Carolina, which have been in almost constant turmoil since World War II, because their farms are large enough to experiment with a variety of possible crops other than tobacco and because their farmers have mustered the necessary entrepreneurial spirit. The use of machines has led farmers to enlarge some of their erstwhile patches into fields, but eastern North Carolina still has one of the nations most complex mosaics of land uses. LARGER FARMS OF THE NEW BELT The technique of flue-cured tobacco production was developed around the time of the Civil War in the area known as the Old Belt, on the Piedmont along the Virginia-North Carolina line [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Growers cured the leaves by baking them at temperatures up to 200[degrees]F for three or four days in small, squat, cubelike barns heated convectionally by flues of sheet metal that crossed their floors (Hart and Chestang 1991, 4). This curing process produced a golden yellow leaf, also called Bright tobacco because of its color and Virginia tobacco because of its origin, that constitutes roughly half of an average cigarette. Farmers in the New Belt, on the Inner Coastal Plain of eastern North Carolina, began a shift to flue-cured tobacco production in the late 1880s, when the price of cotton dropped disastrously, but they retained the familiar system of sharecropping. Although landholdings in the New Belt were appreciably larger than the small family farms of the Old Belt, their subdivision into sharecropper units disguised their true size, because the census of agriculture insisted on counting sharecropper units as separate farms [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. …

Why Applied Geography

The current cycle of urban growth dates from the 1970s and is likely to persist into the 2020s. Some of the worlds most eminent urban geographers bring their expertise to bear on the American urban scene. They describe how cities have evolved, assess their current characters, and look ahead to the momentous changes yet to come.

Kilofarms in The Agricultural Heartland

Census data do not support the widespread popular perception that urban encroachment on cropland in California is serious enough to justify programs of farmland preservation. Between 1949 and 1997 the acreage of harvested cropland declined near Los Angeles, in the San Francisco Bay area, and near Sacramento, but the high‐value specialty agricultural production displaced from these areas has been relocated to more distant areas, where it has replaced lower‐value field crops, and specialized agricultural production has increased steadily in the state. Vegetable production in the Salinas Valley and dairying near Los Angeles illustrate the twin processes of relocation and replacement. Urban encroachment actually has been a boon to California agriculture, because it has transferred massive amounts of urban capital to cash‐strapped farmers and enabled them to develop efficient modern operations. Much of the concern about loss of farmland really is concern about loss of open space and amenities, and urban demand for water probably will be a greater constraint on California agriculture than will urban demand for land.

From Bolls to Boles

Abstract As we Homo sapiens on planet Earth prepare for possible contact with extraterrestrial life (ET)—especially extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) life—we need to consider ethics. What will be the ethical posture we adopt as Earth meets space? This article advocates an ethic of praxis based upon the concept of a Cosmic Commons. Intelligent extraterrestrial beings, from their experiences in biotic and abiotic environments, should share with us a universal regard for intelligence (intellilife), respect for biotic evolution, and a sense of responsibility for shared common space in our places in the universe. As we venture from Earth into space, what will be required? Not anxiety over human dis-placement to new worlds; nor should we invest our efforts in irresponsibly exploiting the natural goods of other planets. Rather, we need an ethical transformation of terrestrial human thought and conduct prior to, during, and as a consequence of extraterrestrial explorations and engagements. We need an anticipatory Cosmic Charter.

A Census Tract Exercise in Local Geography.

The body of King Cotton lies amouldering in the grave, but his soul has been metempsychosized. Cotton dominated the agriculture of the South in 1929, the peak year, when 1,719,165 farmers grew 42,579,522 acres of the crop. Few grew more than 15 acres, or produced more than one-third of a bale per acre. They grew it in small patches with backbreaking hand labor, especially for the tasks of chopping and picking. In 1997 only 24,860 farmers in the South grew cotton, but they grew 11,799,225 acres. They had consolidated the erstwhile patches into large open fields. They averaged 425 acres of cotton, and produced better than a bale per acre. Agrichemicals and machines had replaced hand labor, and one-fifth of the crop was irrigated. The boll weevil eradication program, which has spread outward from northeastern North Carolina, has decimated production costs, and the price had been favorable. Inadequate gin capacity has forced farmers to shift from field wagons to modules, and a new cotton landscape has been created in the South.

Southern Crops in 1924

Geographers, like Robert Frost’s ants, are a curious race. As a group we are woefully insecure, and nothing binds us together more closely than the deep-seated conviction that we are not properly appreciated. So many members of our tribe complain so constantly about the failure of geographers to receive the respect they think we deserve that I once was tempted to wonder whether Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) might have been the first to complain about the poor public image of geography. Certainly he was not the last; Ronald F. Abler, in his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 1987, felt moved to castigate ‘the incessant whining of geographers’ (Abler 1987, p. 515).