Civil Eats

DECEMBER 10, 2024

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.

Plantation 113

Plantation Farming Farming Acre 113

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 52

Acre Farming Farming Crop 52

Civil Eats

OCTOBER 24, 2023

After six years of enriching the soil and cultivating neighborly relationships, however, We Grow Farms is up against an insurmountable challenge facing many farms and pastures across the state: the real estate market. While Hawkins is sympathetic to the need, he says the farm’s uprooting will come at a great cost.

Cultivation 125

Cultivation Acre Farming Farming 125