Remove Farmland Remove Grain Remove Sharecropping
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Transforming the Delta

Food Environment and Reporting Network

Over the next two decades, tractors, mechanical harvesters, and chemical herbicides made sharecropping obsoleteyou no longer needed much labor to farm cotton or grains. In 1920, Blacks owned or operated 14 percent of all farmland in the U.S.; The farms had to be large, though, to pay off the machines.

Acre 111
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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. Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s. It really is modern-day sharecropping. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.