Remove Processing Remove Sharecropping Remove Tractor
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Meet the Arkansas Farmers Turning Sweet Potatoes into Spirits

Modern Farmer

But the process hasn’t always come easily. After the Civil War, the sharecropping period often involved predatory practices, including low wages and unsafe conditions. I just didn’t want to do traditional… I don’t know, crop farming, just driving tractors every day.” His brother and late father, Harvey Sr.,

Acre 95
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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. When he was nine, he started trucking the tobacco, or driving the loaded tractor from the fields where the hands were harvesting the leaves up to the barns where they were flue cured. It really is modern-day sharecropping.

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Transforming the Delta

Food Environment and Reporting Network

The soybeans and corn are processed into animal feed and ethanol, mostly outside the region; the cotton is exported to textile mills in Asia. Processing the crops in the Delta would funnel even more money into the regional economy. When he was fifteen, a tractor flipped over on his father and killed him.

Acre 89
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California Will Help BIPOC Collective Cultivate Land Access for Underserved Farmers

Civil Eats

Along with more fields and new water infrastructure, Brown’s wish list of upgrades includes cold storage, a washing and staging station, and tractor access—most of which require additional space, construction, and expensive permits. And despite the security of family property, there’s no room to expand. That’s the only way we survived.”

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A palm oil company, a group of U.S. venture capitalists, and the destruction of Peru’s rainforest

Food Environment and Reporting Network

The company has replaced its trucks and tractors with mules and water buffalo and has vowed not to expand its operations into standing forest. Oil palm fruits being processed at Ocho Sur’s mill in Ucayali. Melka had sought to bring another 12,000 acres into cultivation through this sharecropping strategy.