Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 20, 2024

Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains. When he was fifteen, a tractor flipped over on his father and killed him. The farms had to be large, though, to pay off the machines. All his siblings left, too.

Acre 80

Acre Farming Farming Crop 80

Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

As director of farmer inclusion, his job is to distribute $1.7 When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. The trailer is still hitched to the old orange tractor they used as they harvested two long rows from a nearby field. It really is modern-day sharecropping.

Plantation 140

Plantation Farming Farming Acre 140

Civil Eats

OCTOBER 24, 2023

The rest is distributed to nearby urban and suburban areas in Yolo and Sacramento counties through food programs and community supported agriculture (CSA) subscription boxes—25 percent of it for free. And despite the security of family property, there’s no room to expand. That’s the only way we survived.”

Cultivation 126

Cultivation Acre Farming Farming 126

Food Environment and Reporting Network

DECEMBER 31, 2024

The company has replaced its trucks and tractors with mules and water buffalo and has vowed not to expand its operations into standing forest. Melka had sought to bring another 12,000 acres into cultivation through this sharecropping strategy. “That is where the conflict began,” he recalled.

Plantation 71

Plantation Acre Cultivation Crop 71