Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land (e.g. 50% of the crop). This should not be confused with a crop fixed rent contract, in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a fixed amount of crop per unit of land (e.g. 1 Tonne per hectare). Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have encompassed the system. Some are governed by tradition, others by law. Legal contract systems such as the Italian mezzadria,[1] the French métayage, and Spanish Mediero[2] occur widely. Islamic law contains a traditional "musaqat" sharecropping agreement[3] for the cultivation of orchards.
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Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the croppers. It encourages the cropper to remain on the land throughout the harvest season to work the land, solving the harvest rush problem. At the same time, since the cropper pays in shares of his harvest, owners and croppers share the risk of harvests being large or small and prices being high or low. Because tenants benefit from larger harvests, they have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than in a slave plantation system. However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms no longer benefit from economies of scale. On the whole, sharecropping was not as economically efficient as the gang agriculture of slave plantations.
Sharecropping occurred extensively in colonial Africa, Scotland, and Ireland and came into wide use in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The South had been devastated by war; planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves had labor but no money and no land; they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. The solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers, who previously had done little cotton farming, needed cash as well and became sharecroppers.[4]
Jeffery Paige made a distinction between centralised sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralised sharecropping with other crops. The former is characterised by political conservatism and long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by wage labour as markets penetrate. Decentralised sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labour and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. Leases are very short which leads to peasant radicalism. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.[5]
Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England[6] (as the practice of "farming to halves"). It is still used in many rural poor areas today, notably in Pakistan and India.
Although there is a perception that sharecropping was exploitative, “[e]vidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk.”[7]
It can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture, and has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. However, Nyambara states that Eurocentric historiographical devices such as 'feudalism' or 'slavery' often qualified by weak prefixes like 'semi-' or 'quasi-' are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa.[8]
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.[9]
The advantages of sharecropping in other situations include enabling access for women[10] to arable land where ownership rights are vested only in men.
Paige pointed out that sharecropping was economically inefficient in a free market. However, many outside factors make it efficient. One factor is slave emancipation: sharecropping provided the freed slaves of the USA, Brazil and the late Roman Empire with land access. It is efficient also as a way of escaping inflation, hence its rise in sixteenth century France and Italy. Landlords opt for sharecropping to avoid the administrative costs and shirking that occurs on plantations and haciendas. It is preferred to cash tenancy because cash tenants take all the risks, and any harvest failure will hurt them and not the landlord. Therefore, they tend to demand lower rents than sharecroppers.[11]
In settler colonies of colonial 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. In South Africa the 1913 Natives' Land Act[12] 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 laborers. In the 1960s, generous subsidies to white farmers meant that most farmers could afford to work their entire farms, and sharecropping faded out.
The arrangement has reappeared in other African countries in modern times, including Ghana[13] and Zimbabwe.[14]
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 slaves for 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. One area that has attracted scholars interested in the rise or origins of Sharecropping is the Natchez District, roughly centered in Adams County Mississippi and the County seat, Natchez. The location of the city, with access to the Mississippi river, but high on a bluff and safe from flooding, meant that the records of the cotton trading Gentry survived the natural disasters. The Civil War largely bypassed the city, saving the records from man made disasters as well.[15] 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.[16][17]
Although the sharecropping system was primarily a post-Civil War development, it did exist in antebellum Mississippi, especially in the northeastern part of the state, an area with few slaves or plantations,[18] and most probably also existed in Tennessee.[19] Sharecropping, along with tenant farming, was a dominant form in the cotton South from the 1870s to the 1950s, among both blacks and whites, but it has largely disappeared.
After the American Civil War, plantation owners had to borrow money to produce crops. Interest rates on these loans were around 15%. The indebtedness of cotton planters increased through the early 1940s, and the average plantation fell into bankruptcy about every twenty years. It is against this backdrop that the wealthiest owners maintained their concentrated ownership of the land.[20]
In Reconstruction-era United States, sharecropping was one of few options for penniless freedmen to conduct subsistence farming and support themselves and their families. Other solutions included the crop-lien system (where the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), a rent labor system (where the former slave rents their land but keeps their entire crop), and the wage system (worker earns a fixed wage, but keeps none of their crop). Sharecropping was by far the most economically efficient, as it provided incentives for workers to produce a bigger harvest. It was a stage beyond simple hired labor, because the sharecropper had an annual contract. During Reconstruction, the Freedman's Bureau wrote and enforced the contracts.
However, sharecropping was an easy way for white former slave owners to take advantage of uneducated freedmen. Former slaves had little to no education, so the landowner could draw up a 70-30 contract instead of half.
Croppers were assigned a plot of land to work, and in exchange owed the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, usually one-half. The owner provided the tools and farm animals. Farmers who owned their own mule and plow were at a higher stage and are called tenant farmers; they paid the landowner less, usually only a third of each crop. In both cases the farmer kept the produce of gardens.
The sharecropper purchased seed, tools and fertilizer, as well as food and clothing, on credit from a local merchant, or sometimes from a plantation store. When the harvest came, the cropper would harvest the whole crop and sell it to the merchant who had extended credit. Purchases and the landowner's share were deducted and the cropper kept the difference—or added to his debt.
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 had to buy seed and implements, sometimes from the plantation owner who often charged 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 was sometimes 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 that perpetuated some of the aspects of slavery, and in the late 19th century maintained a stable, low-cost work force that replaced slave labor; it was the bottom rung in the Southern tenancy ladder.
By the early 1930s there were 5.5 million white tenants, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States, and 3 million blacks.[21][22] In Tennessee whites made up two thirds or more of the sharecroppers.[19] In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85 percent of black farmers were.[18] Sharecropping continued to be a significant institution in Tennessee agriculture for more than sixty years after the Civil War, peaking in importance in the early 1930s, when sharecroppers operated approximately one-third of all farm units in the state.[19]
The situation of landless farmers who challenged the system in the rural south as late as 1941 has been described thus: "he is at once a target subject of ridicule and vitriolic denunciation; he may even be waylaid by hooded or unhooded leaders of the community, some of whom may be public officials. If a white man persists in 'causing trouble', the night riders may pay him a visit, or the officials may haul him into court; if he is a Negro, a mob may hunt him down."[23]
Sharecroppers formed unions in the 1930s, beginning in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1931, and Arkansas in 1934. Membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union included both blacks and poor whites. As leadership strengthened, meetings became more successful, and protest became more vigorous, landlords responded with a wave of terror.[24]
Sharecroppers' strikes in Arkansas and the Bootheel of Missouri, the 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Strike, were documented in the film Oh Freedom After While.[25]
In the 1930s and 1940s, increasing mechanization virtually brought the institution of sharecropping to an end in the United States.[19][26] 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 Western United States during World War II.
Typically, a sharecropping agreement would specify which party was expected to cover certain expenses, like seed, fertilizer, weed control, irrigation district assessments, and fuel. Sometimes the sharecropper covered those costs, but they expected a larger share of the crop in return. The agreement would also indicate whether the sharecropper would use his own equipment to raise the crops, or use the landlord's equipment. The agreement would also indicate whether the landlord would pick up his or her share of the crop in the field or whether the sharecropper would deliver it (and where it would be delivered.)
For example, a landowner may have a sharecropper farming an irrigated hayfield. The sharecropper uses his own equipment, and covers all the costs of fuel and fertilizer. The landowner pays the irrigation district assessments and does the irrigating himself. The sharecropper cuts and bales the hay, and delivers one-third of the baled hay to the landlord's feedlot. The sharecropper might also leave the landlord's share of the baled hay in the field, where the landlord would fetch it when he wanted hay.
Another arrangement could have the sharecropper delivering the landlord's share of the product to market, in which case the landlord would get his share in the form of the sale proceeds. In that case, the agreement should indicate the timing of the delivery to market, which can have a significant effect on the ultimate price of some crops. The market timing decision should probably be decided shortly before harvest, so that the landlord has more complete information about the area's harvest, to determine whether the crop will earn more money immediately after harvest, or whether it should be stored until the price rises. Market timing can entail storage costs and losses to spoilage as well, for some crops.
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 farmers' 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.
The theory of share tenancy was long dominated by Alfred Marshall's famous footnote 5, wherein he illustrated the inefficiency of agricultural share-contracting. Steven N.S. Cheung (1969),[27] challenged this view, showing that with sufficient competition and in the absence of transaction costs, share tenancy will be equivalent to competitive labor markets and therefore efficient.[28] He also showed that in the presence of transaction costs, share-contracting may be preferred to either wage contracts or rent contracts—due to the mitigation of labor shirking and the provision of risk sharing. Joseph Stiglitz (1974,[29] 1988),[30] suggested that if share tenancy is only a labor contract, then it is only pairwise-efficient and that land-to-the-tiller reform would improve social efficiency by removing the necessity for labor contracts in the first place. Reid (1973),[31] Murrel (1983),[32] Roumasset (1995)[33] and Allen and Lueck (2004)[34] provided transaction cost theories of share-contracting, wherein tenancy is more of a partnership than a labor contract and both landlord and tenant provide multiple inputs. It has been also argued that the sharecropping institution can be explained by factors such as informational asymmetry (Hallagan, 1978;[35] Allen, 1982;[36] Muthoo, 1998 [37]), moral hazard (Reid, 1976;[38] Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985;[39] Ghatak and Pandey, 2000[40]) or limited liability (Shetty, 1988;[41] Basu, 1992;[42] Sengupta, 1997;[43] Ray and Singh, 2001[44]).
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