Crop-Lien System

Examples of Crop-Lien System in the following topics:

• Inadequate Currency

  • One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers after the American Civil War.
  • The crop-lien system is a credit system that became widely used by farmers in the United States in the South from the 1860s to the 1920s.
  • The crop-lien system was a way for farmers to get credit before the planting season by borrowing against the value for anticipated harvests.
  • The credit system was used by land owners, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers.
  • The merchant insisted that more cotton, or some other cash crop, be grown—nothing else paid well—and thus came to dictate the crops that a farmer grew.

• The Farm Problem and Agrarian Protest Movements

  • The Farmers' Alliance was an 1880s agrarian movement with the goals of ending the crop-lien system and promoting higher commodity prices.
  • Its first convention was in 1892, when delegates from farm, labor, and reform organizations met in Omaha, Nebraska, determined at last to make their mark on a U.S. political system that they viewed as hopelessly corrupted by the moneyed interests of the industrial and commercial trusts.
  • Bank failures abounded in the South and Midwest; unemployment soared and crop prices fell badly.

• The Farmer's Alliance

  • One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers in the period following the American Civil War.

• Agriculture, Tenancy, and the Environment

  • At harvest time, the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest).
  • The system started with blacks when large plantations were subdivided.
  • Other solutions included the crop-lien system (in which the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), the rent-labor system (in which former slaves rented land but kept the entire crop), and the wage system (in which the worker earned a fixed wage, but kept none of his crop).
  • This system was distinct from the sharecropper.
  • The landowner would extend to the farmer shelter, food, and necessary items on credit to be repaid out of the tenant's share of the crop.

• The Agrarian and Populist Movements

  • Crop reports were circulated, co-operative dairies multiplied, and co-operative flour mills were operated.
  • Such laws were known as Granger Laws, and their general principles, endorsed in 1876 by the Supreme Court of the United States, remain important to the current American legal system.
  • For the Southern farmer, a clear enemy was the crop-lien system, in which farmers mortgaged their future crops in return for furnished supplies.

• The Plantation Economy and the Planter Class

  • Plantation economies rely on the export of cash crops as a source of income.
  • The longer a crop's harvest period, the more efficient plantations are.
  • Crops such as coconuts, rubber, and cotton are to a lesser extent.
  • Sugar also has a long history as a plantation crop.
  • Growing had to follow a precise, scientific system to profit from the production.

• The Triangular Trade

  • Triangular Trade was a system in which slaves, crops, and manufactured goods were traded between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
  • The Second Atlantic System, from the 17th through early 19th centuries, was the trade of enslaved Africans dominated by British, French, and Dutch merchants.
  • European colonists in the Americas initially practiced systems of both bonded labor and indigenous slavery.
  • Many American crops (including cotton, sugar, and rice) were not grown in Europe, and importing crops and goods from the New World often proved to be more profitable than producing them on the European mainland.
  • The term triangular trade is used to characterize much of the Atlantic trading system from the 16th to early 19th centuries, in which three main commodity-types—labor, crops, and manufactured goods—were traded in three key Atlantic geographic regions.

• Slave Labor

  • The great majority of slaves worked on plantations or large farms, where good-quality soil and climate made for labor-intensive cultivation of lucrative cash crops such as rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton.
  • There were two primary types of labor systems seen on plantations: the gang system and the task system.
  • The task system, on the other hand, was less harsh and allowed the slaves more autonomy than the gang system.
  • Evidence suggests that the task system was gender oriented.
  • Research suggests that the task system was an offshoot of the division of labor that was already in place in the African tribal systems before the Atlantic slave trade brought the slaves over to the American colonies.

• Devastation in the South

  • The transportation infrastructure lay in ruins, with little railroad or riverboat service available to move crops and animals to market.
  • Restoring the infrastructure—especially the railroad system—became a high priority for Reconstruction state governments.
  • Having used most of their capital to purchase slaves, white planters had minimal cash to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops.
  • The South was thus transformed from a prosperous minority of landed gentry slaveholders into a tenant farming agriculture system.
  • By the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, the South was locked into a system of poverty.

• Chesapeake Slavery

  • Each of these colonies developed a similar agricultural system that revolved around tobacco, which was later diversified with the introduction of cotton and indigo.
  • At first, Chesapeake farmers hired indentured servants—men and women from England who sold their labor for a period of five to seven years in exchange for passage to the American colonies—to harvest tobacco crops.
  • As the demand for Chesapeake cash crops continued to grow, planters began to increasingly invest in the Atlantic slave trade.
  • A great deal of support for the system of chattel slavery came from the wealthy white's fear of rebellions from the labor force.
  • The headright system was designed to promote immigrant settlement and the cultivation of key staple crops that increased the prosperity of the Chesapeake region.