sharecropping

sharecropper | American Dictionary

sharecropper
noun[ C ]
us/ˈʃerˌkrɑp·ər, ˈʃær-/
US history
a member of a low social class of farm workers who receive a share of the value of the crop and who must pay the farm owner for seed, tools, food, and a place to live

sharecropper | Business English

sharecropper
noun[ C ]
uk /ˈʃeəˌkrɒpər/us
a farmer who rents land and who gives part of his or her crop as rent to the land owner:
Unfortunately landlords are willing to provide land to poor sharecroppers if they'll grow poppy on it.

sharecropping

noun[ U ]
Sharecropping was a way of life for many former slaves.

Examples of sharecropper

sharecropper
In general, the region lacked a significant number of white small farmers, even of tenants and sharecroppers.
This incentive will be smaller for a sharecropper, who would get only a half of the additional output, than for a fixed-rent tenant.
The old generation, born between 1915 and 1920, were mostly tenant farmers, sharecroppers, or plantation workers.
The landlord had to lease 210 hectares of his 318 hectares to sixty former sharecroppers under a fixed rent arrangement.
With inheritance, the ownerships of these landowners had grown too small to be economical, forcing them to migrate and rent the land to sharecroppers.
As mentioned, the two capitalist farms were seized and parceled out among former sharecroppers, farmworkers, and its two landowners.
Most households were sharecroppers at the same level in the village's social hierarchy and lacking any appreciable internal socio-economic differentiation.
The legal discourse from the classical period understood that the tenant/sharecropper/labourer was a necessary part of the functioning of the agrarian regime.
The majority of households use the system but sharecroppers do not.
The sharecroppers depended totally on the landowners for their livelihood.
It is misleading to argue, however, that mechanisation replaced labour and that former sharecroppers were driven by poverty to urban areas.
Landlords, jotedars, tenant proprietors, sharecroppers and a host of other intermediaries all claimed a part of the produce of each plot of land.
Once the migrant worker established his/her loyalty to the indigenous farmer, they may be contracted as sharecroppers.
Planters eventually acquiesced because they maintained control over crucial productive decisions : cotton is what they wanted, and cotton is what the sharecroppers grew.
French agriculture after 1850 would, in theory, have seen sharecroppers climb the farming ladder and switch to fixed-rent contracts.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.