Author: William Bailey
Planning Unit: Plant and Soil Sciences
Major Program: Tobacco
Outcome: Initial Outcome
Tobacco educational programming has traditionally been a very in-person, face-to-face effort that has involved 20 to 30 in-person grower meetings between January and March every year. With the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021, these tobacco educational efforts had to be converted to a very non-traditional virtual format. In 2021, Tobacco Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) trainings, required annually by the tobacco industry for all tobacco growers since 2013, were offered in several virtual offering choices for growers. I produced four on-line GAP training modules focusing on the topics of angular leafspot management, angular leaf spot biology and identification, cigar wrapper tobacco production, and tobacco production budgeting that were available for viewing in an online formal that could be viewed at the grower's descretion. In addition, a paper version of these training modules was produced to serve Amish growers and others that were not able to access these training modules online. Finally, two virtual live GAP trainings were conducted in January and February 2021. These two live online trainings were viewed by over 600 tobacco growers, with another 500 viewing the recording training in the months following the live trainings.
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