**5.1 Population and sample**

In this section, our objective is to answer the question: What is the level of support among CBOs in the southeastern black belt states (BBS) for sustainable agricultural practices? To answer this question, we conducted a telephone survey of community action agencies (CAAs) located in eleven Black Belt States in the southeastern U.S. Namely, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. BBS was defined as a state with an African American population that is equal to or greater than 12% of the population of the state. Following [34], we defined community-based organizations as nonprofit civic entities that are locally controlled; and whose mission is to serve a particular constituency that is tied to a defined locality. These entities comprise groups of people who interact directly, frequently and in multi-faceted ways to deliver service to their constituency [34]. We chose to use CAAs as our population of CBOs because they have a long operational history as a group, and they were specifically established by federal mandate to address poverty, by engaging the community in the problem solving process. Additionally, an easily accessible data base was available, and they fit neatly the profile of CBOs as defined in this chapter. The sample frame for CAAs was obtained from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Web site. We retrieved lists of CAAs for the BBS listed above and combined them into a single master roster containing 315 CAAs. Since the population size is a relatively small one, and all the CAAs on our list were accessible, we decided to do a census instead of drawing a random sample from this small sample frame.

### **5.2 Instrumentation**

Respondents to our interview were CAA leaders. Based on our discussion above on the practice of sustainable agricultural production system at the community level, we asked the following questions:


the socioeconomic and ecological concerns associated with corporate commodity agriculture or, more broadly, conventional food production systems [2, 14, 36, 37]. Community-based agriculture with its emphasis on holistic and locally based agriculture systems has catalyzed regionally based economic activity, the focus of which is to reinvigorate rural communities and economies and improve farmer income [13]. The growing interest and belief in the potential of civic agriculture systems to bolster rural communities and their economies rests on the findings of [2, 24, 38], which indicate that several small locally owned and operated businesses (farms) are positively correlated with economically vibrant communities and superior income equity. These findings speak to the thesis that a sustainable agricultural production system must meet economic and social criteria in addition to addressing ecological concerns (see **Figure 1**).


The questionnaire was reviewed by faculty of the Applied Survey Laboratory at North Carolina A&T State University and two leaders of CAAs. The response rate for the survey was approximately 39%. We acknowledge that the results are probably biased because of the relatively low response rate. However, because CAAs are probably subjected to similar socializing influences with regard to the variables of the study, we believe that the low response rate is not a very serious problem. [39] suggested that discrepancies and bias due to non-response are a greater threat for variables denoting characteristics of an entity than for those variables that represent opinions, attitudes or processes. Nonetheless, the results should be interpreted with this weakness in mind.
