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Prime farmland, it attracted countless farmers, including the Black farmers seeking to fulfill the promise of “40 acres and a mule” that followed the American Civil War. After the Civil War, the sharecropping period often involved predatory practices, including low wages and unsafe conditions. But the process hasn’t always come easily.
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. today it is less than 2 percent.
When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. It really is modern-day sharecropping. Today, the approximately 40,000 Black farmers remaining in America own less than 1 percent of the countrys farmland. The elders refer to the USDA as the last plantation, she says.
Together, BIPOC growers own less than 2 percent of all farmland in the country. “You need at least $1 million to purchase farmland in California, and that doesn’t even include the tools, infrastructure, resources, and the labor.” million grant in 2022 to Ujamaa for the purchase of a medium-sized plot of land in Yolo County.
The birth of an unjust agricultural system From plantations to sharecropping, since its inception the U.S. They aimed to maximize profits by exploiting humans and the environment through cheap labor, human commodification, and maximizing yields of a few commodity crops that degraded the soil.
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