Sharefarming is a system of

farming Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to ...

in which sharefarmers make use of agricultural assets they do not own in return for some percentage of the profits. Sometimes the sharefarmer will receive a wage from the owner instead, although such a person is normally considered a

tenant farmer A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, ...

or farm labourer. Two common implementations of the sharefarming concept are

sharecropping Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...

and

sharemilking Sharemilking, a form of sharefarming, operates in the dairy industry. The application of this model of agriculture occurs particularly commonly in New Zealand. The most common arrangement is ''herd-owning sharemilking'' or ''50:50 sharemilking''. ...

, although it is applied to other sorts of agricultural assets. Sharefarming was common in colonial Africa, in Scotland, and in Ireland; it came into wide use in the United States during the

Reconstruction Reconstruction may refer to: Politics, history, and sociology *Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company *''Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Union ...

era (late 19th-century). In Europe, especially France and Italy, a sharefarming system called

metayage The metayage ; es, mediería ; it, mezzadria . system is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping. Another class of land tenancy in France is named , whereby the rent is ...

once commonly occurred. While sharefarming can be seen as a form of oppression similar to

feudal Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in Middle Ages, medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a wa ...

serfdom Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which develop ...

and is in practice in many poor areas today, such as India, it is also common in highly developed countries. The latter case occurs where individual farmers prefer not to have complete responsibility for agricultural assets such as the land or livestock, and in such applications it is not considered exploitative.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping is the most common application of the sharefarming principle. In practice, sharefarmers work land which they don't own in return for varying portions of the total profit. In many cases where it is practiced in very poor farming communities it is considered an exploitative model. Sharecropping began after the Civil War and ended between the 1930s and the 1940s because when machines came that could to farming more easily, landowners didn't need actual people working the fields.

Sharemilking

Sharemilking is the application of the sharefarming concept to the dairy industry. Sharemilkers tend to own their own cows but use facilities they do not own to actually milk the cows. This is often a convenient arrangement as milking facilities would otherwise lie empty and unused for several hours of the day.

Sharecropping

Sharemilking

See also