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Sharecropping

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Sharecropping:Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. (1941)
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Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. (1941)

Sharecropping is a system of agricultural production where a landowner allows a sharecropper to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land. There are a wide range of different situations and types of agreement: some governed by tradition, others by law. Legal contract systems such as métayage (French origin) and aparcería (Spanish) occur widely, and Islamic law has a traditional “musaqat” sharecropping agreement[1] for the cultivation of orchards.

Sharecropping typically involves a relatively richer owner of the land and a poorer agricultural worker or farmer; although the reverse relationship, in which a poor landlord leases out to a rich tenant[2] also exists. The typical form of sharecropping is generally seen as exploitative, particularly with large holdings of land where there is evident disparity of wealth between the parties. It can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture and it has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. (Sharecropping is distinguished from serfdom in that sharecroppers have freedom in their private lives and, at least in theory, freedom to leave the land; and distinguished from indenture in sharecroppers’ entitlement to a share of production and, at least in theory, freedom to delegate the work to others.)

Sharecropping agreements can however be made fairly, as a form of tenant farming or sharefarming that has a variable rental payment, paid in arrears. There are three different types of contracts. One, workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum, and keep the whole crop. Second, workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner, but keep none of the crop. Lastly, workers can neither work nor get paid from the land owner, so the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop. The advantages of sharecropping in other situations include enabling access for women[3] to arable land where ownership rights are vested only in men.

The system occurred extensively in colonial Africa, Scotland, and Ireland and came into wide use in the United States during the Reconstruction era (1865-1876). Its use has also been identified in England[4](as the practice of "farming to halves"). It is still used in many rural poor areas today, notably in India.



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North America

Sharecropping:Sharecroppers at roadside after eviction (1936)
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Sharecroppers at roadside after eviction (1936)

Sharecropping became widespread as a response to economic upheaval caused by the emancipation of slaves and disenfranchisement of poor whites in the agricultural South during Reconstruction. Plantations had first relied on Indentured servants to function being used as cheap labor. Prior to emancipation, sharecropping was limited to poor landless whites, usually working marginal lands for absentee landlords. Following emancipation, sharecropping came to be an economic arrangement that largely maintained the status quo between black and white through legal means. The mass influx of immigrants in the 1900s brought an increase in sharecropping during the World War I era. Sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, and other cash crops and received a small portion of the parcel's output.[5][6]

Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both black and white) were economically confined to serf-like conditions of poverty. To work the land, sharecroppers must buy seed and implements, sometimes from the plantation owner who may charge exorbitant prices against the sharecropper's next season. Arrangements also typically gave half or less of the crop to the sharecropper, and the sale price in some cases was set by the landowner. Lacking the resources to market their crops independently, the sharecropper might be compensated in scrip redeemable only at the plantation.

Thus the cost of production and price of sale were both largely controlled by the land owner, with the sharecropper having little, if any, margin for profit. These factors made sharecroppers dependent on the plantation owners in a way similar to slavery. The sharecropping system in the U.S. increased during the Great Depression with the creation of tenant farmers following the failure of many small farms throughout the Dustbowl. Traditional sharecropping declined after mechanization of farm work became economical in the mid-20th-century. As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to the industrialized North to work in factories, or become migrant workers in the West during World War II.

Modern sharecropping

A variation on this system still exists in places like rural Montana as a way for landowners to farm their land without owning the required equipment. It goes by names like "custom haying". As an example, a landowner might have 50 acres (202,000 m²) of land, which would be capable of producing roughly 300 tons of alfalfa in a year. At a market rate of US$75 per ton, the annual revenue from sale of the alfalfa would be insufficient to justify purchasing a tractor, swather, baler, and the other equipment required for modern hay farming. The solution is to have a modern-day sharecropper provide all of the equipment and do all of the work in return for a share of the crop (typically half or more).

This system is in widespread use in the midwestern Corn Belt today though it is rarely called that. The farmer provides all of the labor and machinery while the landowner provides the land. Typically fertilizer and herbicide costs are shared between the two. They also share the income from the crops harvested. Arrangements vary from community to community. In Illinois some share on a 50/50 basis while others share 60% to the farmer and 40% to the landowner. Some less productive land is shared at 2/3 to the farmer and 1/3 to the landowner, though this arrangement is disappearing. Strangely this system just goes by the name "rented land" as opposed to another method called "cash rent".

Cash rent is a system whereby the farmer pays the landowner a cash fee to cultivate a particular property for a specific period of time. The farmer then keeps all of the income. This practice is very common in Tobacco agriculture in North Carolina and Virginia. Individual properties have specific annual "allotments" from the USDA which may be cultivated for Tobacco, and specific allotments for other crops as well. Property owners may choose to lease or "sell" their annual allotments to others for agreed periods of time.

See also

India

Although technological changes and socialist government policies have resulted in some reduction in its use, sharecropping is still extremely prominent in many parts of rural India. The system is generally stratified along caste lines with land owning castes employing non-land owning castes to work on farms in exchange for a small portion of the produce. The higher caste groups often live in separate parts of the village segregated from the lower castes and use separate sources of drinking water in accordance with the Indian caste system.

Africa

In colonial South Africa sharecropping was a feature of the agricultural life. White farmers, who owned most of the land, were frequently unable to work the whole of their farm for lack of capital. They therefore allowed black farmers to work the excess on a sharecropping basis. The 1913 Natives Land Act outlawed the ownership of land by blacks in areas designated for white ownership, and effectively reduced the status of most sharecroppers to tenant farmers and then to farm labourers. In the 1960s generous subsidies to white farmers meant that most farmers could now afford to work their entire farms, and sharecropping virtually disappeared.

The arrangement has reappeared in other African countries in modern times, including Ghana[7] and Zimbabwe.[8]

Farmer's Cooperatives

Cooperative farming exists in many forms throughout the United States, Canada, and the rest of the world. Various arrangements can be made through collective bargaining or purchasing to get the best deals on seeds, supplies, and equipment. For example, members of a farmer's cooperative who cannot afford heavy equipment of their own, can lease them for nominal fees from the cooperative. Farmers cooperatives can also allow groups of small farmers and dairymen to manage pricing and prevent undercutting by competitors.

Non-agricultural usages

The term sharecropping has also become common in Science fiction criticism, by analogy with the agricultural system, to describe the practice of authors writing stories within another author's established setting (usually for an anthology with the setting's owner's name most prominently displayed on the book cover).

References

  1. ^ Sources include [1] accessed June 19, 2006
  2. ^ Bellemare, Marc F., Testing between Competing Theories of Reverse Share Tenancy, Working Paper, Terry Sanford Insitute of Public Policy, Duke University
  3. ^ Bruce, John W. Country Profiles of Land Tenure: Africa, 1996 (Lesotho, page 221) Research Paper No. 130, December 1998, Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison accessed at [2] June 19, 2006
  4. ^ Griffiths, L. Farming to Halves: A New Perspective on a Miserable System in Rural History Today, Issue 6:2004 p.5, accessed at British Agricultural History Society [3] June 14, 2006
  5. ^ Woodman, Harold D. (1995). New South - New Law: The legal foundations of credit and labor relations in the Postbellum agricultural South. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-1941-5
  6. ^ F. N. Boney (2004-02-06). Poor Whites. The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 2006-05-18.
  7. ^ Leonard, R. and Longbottom, J., Land Tenure Lexicon: A glossary of terms from English and French speaking West Africa International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, 2000 cited in Multilingual Thesaurus on Land Tenure, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, Rome, 2003 accessed at [4] June18, 2006
  8. ^ Pius S Nyambara (2003). Rural Landlords, Rural Tenants, and the Sharecropping Complex in Gokwe, Northwestern Zimbabwe, 1980s-2002. Retrieved on 2006-05-18., Centre for Applied Social Sciences, University of Zimbabwe and Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, March 2003 (200Kb PDF)


See also

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Agriculture | Agricultural labor | Social classes | Property

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