Modern Farmer
JUNE 30, 2023
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.” But the process hasn’t always come easily. His brother and late father, Harvey Sr.,
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.
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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.
Civil Eats
OCTOBER 24, 2023
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.”
Food Environment and Reporting Network
DECEMBER 31, 2024
The company has replaced its trucks and tractors with mules and water buffalo and has vowed not to expand its operations into standing forest. Melka had sought to bring another 12,000 acres into cultivation through this sharecropping strategy. “That is where the conflict began,” he recalled.
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