what is the difference between sharecropping and tenant farming? Sharecropping is a system of agriculture or agricultural production in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land . A tenant farmer is onewho resides on and farms land owned by a landlord.
In a sense, there is no difference between tenant farming and share cropping because share cropping is one form of tenant farming. To the extent that there is a difference, you can say that share cropping is the form of tenant farming that is least beneficial to the tenant.
Difference Between Sharecroppers and Tenant Farmers
The sharecroppers are fully dependent on landowners for input supply and equipment while tenant farmers usually owned necessary materials and paid the landowner rent for farmland and a house making them less dependent on owners.
Since the Civil War ended slavery, all the money that was invested in slaves was wiped out. The plantation economy – huge farms producing cotton or tobacco or rice based on forced labor – was destroyed. In this vacuum developed two new labor systems: sharecropping and tenant farming.
Sharecropping, form of tenant farming in which the landowner furnished all the capital and most other inputs and the tenants contributed their labour . Depending on the arrangement, the landowner may have provided the food, clothing, and medical expenses of the tenants and may have also supervised the work.
Sharecropping was bad because it increased the amount of debt that poor people owed the plantation owners . Sharecropping was similar to slavery because after a while, the sharecroppers owed so much money to the plantation owners they had to give them all of the money they made from cotton.
Sharecropping was widespread in the South during Reconstruction, after the Civil War. It was a way landowners could still command labor, often by African Americans, to keep their farms profitable. It had faded in most places by the 1940s. But not everywhere .
Sharecropping developed, then, as a system that theoretically benefited both parties . Landowners could have access to the large labor force necessary to grow cotton, but they did not need to pay these laborers money, a major benefit in a post-war Georgia that was cash poor but land rich.
Does tenant farming still exist?
A tenant farmer is one who resides on land owned by a landlord . ... In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances.
Who were the tenants?
A tenant is someone who pays rent for the place they live in , or for land or buildings that they use. Regulations placed clear obligations on the landlord for the benefit of the tenant. Landowners frequently left the management of their estates to tenant farmers.
With the southern economy in disarray after the abolition of slavery and the devastation of the Civil War, sharecropping enabled white landowners to reestablish a labor force, while giving freed Black people a means of subsistence .
The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping. High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next.
They did not have slaves or money to pay a free labor force, so sharecropping developed as a system that could benefit plantation owners and former slaves . Landowners would have access to a large labor force, and the newly freed slaves were looking for work.
How does tenant farming work?
Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management , while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management.
Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop. No money changes hands but the worker and land owner each keep a share of the crop.
- The trend was deepened by sharecropping and other forms of bondage.
- Sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the slave-dependent plantation system.
- He was raised nearby on sharecropping farms along the Ohio River.
- The land was mostly farmed in sharecropping and was all tithed.
