Sharecropping

Sharecropping is a land-tenure arrangement in which a tenant farms land belonging to a landowner in exchange for giving the landowner an agreed share, often a third to a half, of the harvest, rather than paying a fixed cash rent. It has historically left the tenant carrying most of the production risk while often remaining in chronic debt to the landowner for seed, tools or living costs, a pattern documented in the post-slavery American South, in colonial and post-colonial India, and in other agrarian economies.