Remove Livestock Remove Sharecropping Remove Tractor
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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. By the time Byron passed away in 1931, he had accumulated 2,000 acres, on which he grew timber and raised livestock. Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s.

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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. 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 111