Tenant farmer
A tenant farmer is a person (
England and Wales
Historically, rural society utilised a three tier structure of
The 17th century to the early 19th century witnessed the growth of large estates, and the opportunity for a farmer to hold land other than by tenancy was significantly reduced,[5][6] with the result that by the 19th century about 90% of agricultural land area and holdings were tenanted, although these figures declined markedly after World War II, to around 60% in 1950, and only 35% of agricultural land area in 1994.[7] High rates of inheritance taxes in the postwar period led to the breakup or reduction of many large estates,[8] allowing many tenants to buy their holdings at favourable prices.
The landmark 1948 Act was enacted at a time when war-time food rationing was still in force and sought to encourage long-term investment by tenants by granting them lifetime security of tenure. Under the Agriculture (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 security was extended to spouses and relatives of tenants for two successions, providing that they had been earning the majority of their income from the holding for five years. Succession rights were however withdrawn for new tenancies in 1984[9] and this was consolidated in the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986. These two statutes also laid down rules for the determination of rents by the arbitration process.[7][10] The 1986 statute covered tenancies over agricultural land where the land was used for a trade or business and the definition of "agriculture" in section 96(1) was wide enough to include various uses that in themselves were not agricultural but were deemed so if ancillary to agriculture (e.g. woodlands). The essence of the code was to establish complex constraints on the landlord's ability to give the notice to quit, whilst also converting fixed-term tenancies into yearly tenancies at the conclusion of the fixed term. In addition, there was a uniform rent ascertainment scheme contained in section 12.
It became difficult to obtain new tenancies as a result of landlords' reluctance to have a tenant protected by the 1986 Act and in 1995 the government of the day, with the support of industry organizations, enacted a new market-oriented code in the form of the Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995. The protection of the 1986 Act remains in respect of tenancies created prior to the existence of the 1995 Act, and for those tenancies falling within section 4 of the 1995 Act. For all other tenancies granted on or after 1 September 1995 their regulation is within the 1995 Act framework.
That Act was altered with effect from 18 October 2006 by the Regulatory Reform (Agricultural Tenancies)(England and Wales) Order 2006 SI 2006/2805, which also contains changes to the 1986 Act. Tenancies granted after 18 October 2006 over agricultural land used for a trade or business will fall within the limited protection of the 1995 Act so as to enjoy (provided the term is more than two years in length or there is a yearly tenancy) a mandatory minimum twelve months written notice to quit, including in respect of fixed terms. There is for all tenancies within the scope of the Act a mandatory tenants' right to remove fixtures and buildings (section 8) together with compensation for improvements (Part III). The rent review provisions in Part II may be the subject of choice to a much greater extent than previously. Disputes under the Act are usually, by the terms of Part IV, the subject of statutory arbitration controlled by the framework of the Arbitration Act 1996.
The current regime under the 1995 Act for regulating tenancies, commonly known as Farm Business Tenancies, permits the creation of a clearly and easily terminable interest, whether by a periodic tenancy or a fixed term. In the cycle of animal husbandry and land use and improvement, the long-term effect of the Farm Business Tenancy on the landscape of Britain is not yet proven. It was predicted by landowners and other industry spokesmen that the 1995 Act would create opportunities for new tenants by allowing large areas of new lettings but this has not happened in practice as most landowners have continued to favour share farming or management agreements over formal tenancies and the majority of new lettings under the Act have been to existing farmers, often
Canada
From the nineteenth century on, tenant farming immigrants came to Canada not just from the British Isles but also the United States of America.[11]
Ireland
Until about 1900, the majority of Ireland was held by landlords, as much as 97% in 1870, and rented out to tenant farmers who had to pay rent to landlords and taxes to the Church of Ireland and State. The majority of the people had no access to land. 1.5% of the population owned 33.7% of the island, and 50% of the country was in the hands of only 750 families. Absenteeism was common and detrimental to the country's progress. Tenants often sub-rented small plots on a yearly basis from local farmers paying for them by labour service by a system, known as conacre, most without any lease or land rights. Irish smallholders were indistinguishable from the cottiers of England.[12][13]
The abuse of tenant farmers led to widespread emigration to the United States and the colonies and was a key factor within the
The
On the formation of the
Japan
In Japan, landowners turned over their land to families of tenant farmers to manage.
Historically, despite Norway being practically a Danish province for almost 300 years before 1814, the countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (with Finland) had differing approaches to land tenure.[26][27]
Norway
A tenant farmer in Norway was known as a husmann (plural: husmenn) and were most common in the mid-19th century when they constituted around one-quarter of the country's population. Heavy demands were placed on these tenants by their landlords, the bønder or land-owning farmers. The majority of the husmann's working hours were usually taken up by work for the landlord, leaving him little time to work on his own land or better his own situation. As a result, though the husmenn were technically free to leave the land at any time, their poor economic state made them in essence "economic serfs". Failing to own their own land also made tenant farmers ineligible to vote according to the
Sweden and Finland
The term torpare/torppari (Swedish/Finnish for
Their situation was usually poor but, contrary to in Denmark, they were in theory always free to leave. The croft's lease was typically paid in the form of corvée. They would work their own land as well as that of a landowning farmer (bonde), noble or other. In some aspects their situation made them easy victims of impressment. Population growth and landreforms (enskiftet) contributed to a 19th century increase of crofts but, particularly in Sweden, also to a shift from tenant farmers to farm laborers (statare) hired on yearlong contracts, paid in-kind.
The lives of torpare and statare were described by prominent Swedish and Finnish novelists and writers such as Ivar Lo-Johansson, Jan Fridegård, Väinö Linna (Under the North Star trilogy) and Moa Martinson. The Statare system was abolished in 1918[29] (Finland) and 1945[30] (Sweden), the Torpare system more gradually.
Scotland
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Scotland has its own independent legal system and the legislation there differs from that of England and Wales. Neither the AHA 1986 nor the ATA 1995 applies in Scotland. The relevant legislation for Scotland is rather the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 2003 with the following amendments in The Public Services Reform (Agricultural Holdings) (Scotland) Order 2011, The Agricultural Holdings (Amendment) (Scotland) Act 2012 and The Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) 2003 Remedial Order 2014. These supersede the previous legislation in the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991 and the Agriculture (Scotland) Act 1948.[10]
For Scotland see Crofting, a traditional and long-established means of tenant and subsistence farming.
United States
Tenant farming has been important in the US from the 1870s to the present. Tenants typically bring their own tools and animals. To that extent it is distinguished from being a sharecropper, which is a tenant farmer who usually provides no capital and pays fees with crops.
A hired hand is an agricultural employee even though he or she may live on the premises and exercise a considerable amount of control over the agricultural work, such as a foreman. A sharecropper is a farm tenant who pays rent with a portion (often half) of the crop he raises and who brings little to the operation besides his family labor; the landlord usually furnishing working stock, tools, fertilizer, housing, fuel, and seed, and often providing regular advice and oversight.
Tenant farming in the North was historically a step on the "agricultural ladder" from hired hand or sharecropper taken by young farmers as they accumulated enough experience and capital to buy land (or buy out their siblings when a farm was inherited).[31]
About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, the rest black. Sharecroppers, the poorest of the poor, organized for better conditions. The racially integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union made gains for sharecroppers in the 1930s. Sharecropping had diminished in the 1940s due to the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and other factors.[32]
Black Belt conditions
In the
- bound employer and worker through the provision of housing, medical care, and other in-kind services along with cash wages. At its heart, it guaranteed a stable and adequate labor supply to the planter. Though restricted by the directives of the planter, workers in return received some measure of economic stability, including a social safety net, access to financial capital, and physical protection in an often-violent society.[34]
Tenant farmers often had agricultural managers who supervised their activities. In 1907, for instance, J. H. Netterville began employment for the Panola Company, an agricultural business founded by William Mackenzie Davidson in the rich farming area of St. Joseph in Tensas Parish in northeastern Louisiana in the Mississippi River delta country. In its heyday, Panola controlled some eleven thousand acres, two-thirds planted in cotton and the other third in grains. Netterville became general manager of three highly profitable Panola properties, the Balmoral, Blackwater, and Wyoming plantations near Newellton, in which capacity he supervised 125 African-American tenant farming families, with little strife and great ease, according to reports from that period.[35]
Latin America
For tenant farmers and other landholding arrangements in Latin America, see Peasant#Latin American farmers.
See also
- Land reform by country
- Peasant
- Serfdom
- Metayage system of sharecropping
- Plain Folk of the Old South, 1949 book, about U.S. before 1860
- Rural tenancy
- Sharecropping
- Verdingkinder
- Colonus (person)
- Kamajiro Hotta
Notes
- OCLC 228439554.
- ISBN 978-0-521-20076-9.
- ISBN 978-0-521-20121-6.
- ISBN 1585441384.
- JSTOR 2592747.
- ISBN 978-0-521-20076-9.
- ^ a b c Gibbard, Ravenscroft and Reeves (1997). "Agricultural Tenancy Reform: The End of Law; or a New Popular Culture?" (PDF). Reading University. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
- ISBN 978-0-7546-3025-8.
- ISBN 978-0-04-307001-7.
- ^ a b "Agricultural tenancies: Overview of the legislation 1948 to 1995". HM Revenue and Customs. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
- S2CID 154294637.
- ISBN 0416374204.
- JSTOR 589217.
- ^ ISBN 0521334209.
- ISBN 0195035941.
- ^ ISBN 0415150078.
- ISBN 052124577X.
- ISBN 0719050464.
- ISBN 9780521841764.
- ^ Lyons, F. S. L.: pp.234-5
- ^ Ferriter, Diarmaid: pp. 62–63
- ^ Land Law (Commission) Act, 1923
- ISBN 0804705305.
- ISBN 0774808225.
- ISBN 0394519639.
- .
- .
- ^ Blegen, Theodore C. (1931). Norwegian Migration to America 1825-1860. Northfield, Minnesota: The Norwegian-American Historical Association.
- ^ Rasila V. 1970, Torpparikysymyksen ratkaisuvaihe (in Finnish)
- Bra Böckers Lexikon, 1980 (in Swedish)
- ^ Donald L. Winters, "Tenant farming in Iowa, 1860-1900: a study of the terms of rental leases." Agricultural History 48.1 (1974): 130–150. Online
- ^ "Sharecropping". Slavery by Another Name. PBS. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
- ^ Arthur F. Raper, Preface to peasantry: A tale of two black belt counties (1936) Online free to borrow.
- ^ Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State (1999) p 28 quoted in Gibbs, "Reconsidering the Southern Black Belt" (2003) p 258.
- ^ Henry E. Chambers, (Chicago: A History of Louisiana, 1925), p. 373
Further reading
British Isles
- Solow, Barbara (1972). The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870–1903. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674508750.
- Taylor, Henry C. (1955). "Food and Farm Land in Britain". Land Economics. 31 (1): 24–34. JSTOR 3159797.
- Winstanley, Michael J. (1984). Ireland and the Land Question 1800–1922. London: Methuen. ISBN 0416374204.
- Buttress, F. A. (1950). Agricultural Periodicals of the British Isles, 1681–1900, and Their Location. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, School of Agriculture.
- Nicholls, Mark (1999). A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529–1603: The Two Kingdoms. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0631193332.
U.S.
- Atack, Jeremy (1989). "The Agricultural Ladder Revisited: A New Look at an Old Question with Some Data for 1860". Agricultural History. 63 (1): 1–25. JSTOR 3743972.
- Atack, Jeremy (1988). "Tenants and Yeomen in the Nineteenth Century". Agricultural History. 62 (3): 6–32. JSTOR 3743206.
- Grubbs, Donald H. (1971). Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union and the New Deal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807811564.
- Hurt, R. Douglas (2003). African American Life in the Rural South, 1900–1950. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0826214711.
- Sothworth, Caleb (2002). "Aid to Sharecroppers: How Agrarian Class Structure and Tenant-Farmer Politics Influenced Federal Relief in the South, 1933–1935". Social Science History. 26 (1): 33–70. S2CID 246274833.
- Turner, Howard A. (1937). "Farm Tenancy Distribution and Trends in the United States". Law and Contemporary Problems. 4 (4): 424–433. JSTOR 1189524.
- Virts, Nancy (1991). "The Efficiency of Southern Tenant Plantations, 1900–1945". Journal of Economic History. 51 (2): 385–395. S2CID 154991172.
World
- Allen, D. W.; Lueck, D. (1992). "Contract Choice in Modern Agriculture: Cash Rent versus Cropshare". S2CID 153707520.
- Liebowitz, Jonathan J. (1989). "Tenants, Sharecroppers, and the French Agricultural Depression of the Late Nineteenth Century". JSTOR 204363.
- Matsuoka, K. (1930). "The Peasant Worker in Japan". Pacific Affairs. 3 (12): 1109–1117. JSTOR 2750255.
- Udo, R. K. (1964). "The Migrant Tenant Farmer of Eastern Nigeria". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 34 (4): 326–339. S2CID 145198131.
External links
- King Cotton's Slaves, 1936 newsreel by The March of Time about landless farmers in the southern United States