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Urban Farms are a Lifeline for Food-Insecure Residents. Will New Jersey Finally Make Them Permanent?

Modern Farmer

The high cost of a permit (up to $5,000 annually) forced her to end her composting program this spring. Even after slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1866, white farmers created their own form of sharecropping called “ cottaging ,” where former enslaved Black people would provide labor in exchange for shelter and crops.

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Black Earth: A Family’s Journey from Enslavement to Reclamation

Civil Eats

When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. It really is modern-day sharecropping. He fertilizes with compost tea, a mixture he creates of compost and water. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.