24 
BULLETIN 1404, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
for agricultural journals and those for weekly papers, this is a good 
showing for colored farmers, and the proportion in this survey was 
considerably larger than the proportion of farmers taking this type 
of paper among whites as ascertained from similar surveys in other 
Southern States. 
EXTENT OF MIGRATION AND DEGREE OF STABILITY OF 
OCCUPANCY 
All of the 146 owners for whom data were available and all but 1 
of the tenants at some time during their experience as farm operators 
had moved from one farm to another. (Table 22.) The owners, with 
an average age of 50.6 years, had made such changes an average of 
3.7 times; with the tenants, whose average age was 42 years, the 
average number of changes was 4. The average period between 
changes for owners was 6.9 years, and for tenants, 4.4 years. The 
average period of occupancy for owners was less than half as long 
as the average period owner farmers in the United States as a whole 
reported in 1920 that they had occupied their farms. On the other 
hand, the tenants studied in Southampton County reported a some- 
what longer period of occupancy than was reported in 1920, for 
tenants in the United States as a whole. It should be noted, how- 
ever, that in the latter case the period of occupancy had not yet 
expired. For the most part, these movements were within the same 
community. Of the owners 60.3 per cent and of the tenants 72.3 
per cent, had never changed their trading center. Thus, tenant 
migrations were merely local in a larger proportion of cases than for 
owners. 
Table 22. — Migration of farmers 
Tenure 
All operators __| 
Number who changed farms j 
Percentage who changed farms. 
Average number of changes 
Average years between changes. 
Average present age of opera- 
tor, years 
Owners 
Tenants 
Number 
Number 
1146 
112 
146 
111 
100 
99.1 
3.7 
4.0 ; 
6.9 
4.4 j 
50.6 
42 
1 
Tenure 
Owners Tenants 
Number who had not changed 
trading center, school, or j 
church 
Percentage who had not | 
changed trading center 
school, or church 
Number 
Number 
81 
72.3 
1 Detailed information not available for total number of owners. 
The degree of stability as measured by the average length of the 
period between changes from farm to farm is shown in Table 23. 
Six of the owners had an average period of occupancy less than 2 
years, between a fifth and a sixth had remained on the same farm 
less than 4 years, about two-fifths had remained an average of less 
than 6 years, but more than a fifth averaged from 6 to 7 years be- 
tween changes of farms. Eighty-two per cent of the tenants had 
remained on the various farms occupied from 1 to 5 years, nearly 
two-fifths of the total for less than 4 years; but about one-sixth held 
continuous occupancy between 6 and 7 years. 
