From Crop Lien to Contract Farming: The Roots of Agribusiness in the American South, 1929-1939

Abstract

In 1929 rural sociologist Rupert Vance surveyed the southern landscape, seeing end in sight to the cotton production that impoverished the South. In search of ways for cotton farmers to diversify, Vance noted that whether equitable or not, a system of division oftheproduct by shares between landlord and tenant has been worked out by custom and lawfor cotton. Indeed, there was a credit system in place that facilitated cotton production, a system that dated back to Reconstruction. Lamenting that no generally accepted system ofshare cropping has been worked out for more complex forms of farming, Vance could notforesee that soon furnishing merchants would refashion the crop lien to facilitate poultry production. For some time, politicians, Vance, and a host of rural reformers waged an unsuccessful war against the crop lien, and its close relatives sharecropping and tenancy, which they considered to be the basis of southern problems. The poultry industry?today the model for contract farming and a multi-million-dollar business?grew out of the crop lien system, an institution thought to be the root of southern poverty.1