Tenant farming facts for kids

Tenant farming is a way of farming where a person works on land they don't own. Instead of owning the farm, the farmer pays rent to the person who owns the land. This rent can be paid with money or with a part of the crops they grow. When the rent is a share of the crops, it's called sharecropping.

What is Tenant Farming?

Tenant farming happens when a farmer doesn't own the land they use for growing crops or raising animals. Imagine you want to grow corn, but you don't have any land. You could find a landowner who has extra land and agree to farm it. In return, you pay them rent.

How Farmers Pay Rent

There are two main ways tenant farmers pay their rent:

• Cash Rent: The farmer pays a set amount of money to the landowner, usually every month or year. It's like renting an apartment, but for a farm.
• Sharecropping: This is when the farmer gives the landowner a part of the crops they harvest. For example, if they grow 100 bushels of wheat, they might give 25 bushels to the landowner as rent. This way, both the farmer and the landowner share the risks and rewards of the harvest.

Why Did People Become Tenant Farmers?

Many people become tenant farmers because they don't have enough money to buy their own land. Buying land can be very expensive, especially good farmland. Tenant farming allows people to work in agriculture and earn a living without a huge upfront cost.

Tenant Farming After Slavery

After the American Civil War ended in 1865, millions of enslaved people in the United States became free. This period was known as the Reconstruction of the United States. Many of these newly freed people did not own land or have much money. To survive and work, many became tenant farmers or sharecroppers. They rented land from large landowners, often the same people who had owned plantations before the war. This system allowed them to farm and support their families, but it often kept them in debt to the landowners.

Images for kids

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  Tenant farmer on his front porch, south of Muskogee, Oklahoma (1939)

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  A typical Husmann residence from Hof