noun
- a system of farming in which a tenant farmer gives a portion of the crop as rent to the landowner
Usage: historical; agricultural
Examples
- Sharecropping became widespread in the American South after the Civil War.
- Many former slaves turned to sharecropping as their primary means of survival.
- The sharecropping system often kept farmers in cycles of debt and poverty.
- Under sharecropping arrangements, tenants typically gave half their harvest to landowners.
- Economic historians study sharecropping as a form of agricultural labor organization.
- The decline of sharecropping began with increased mechanization of farming.