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.

• Agricultural Diversity

  • Resistance to disease is a chief benefit to maintaining crop biodiversity; lack of diversity in contemporary crop species carries similar risks.
  • Loss of wild species related to a crop will mean the loss of potential in crop improvement.
  • Since the 1920s, government agriculture departments have maintained seed banks of crop varieties as a way to maintain crop diversity.
  • In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault began storing seeds from around the world as a backup system to the regional seed banks .
  • Conditions within the vault are maintained at ideal temperature and humidity for seed survival, but the deep underground location of the vault in the arctic means that failure of the vault's systems will not compromise the climatic conditions inside the vault.

• 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.

• Fungi as Plant, Animal, and Human Pathogens

  • The production of sufficient good-quality crops is essential to human existence.
  • Plant diseases have ruined crops, bringing widespread famine.
  • Fungi are also responsible for food spoilage and the rotting of stored crops.
  • Systemic mycoses spread to internal organs, most commonly entering the body through the respiratory system.
  • They mainly affect individuals who have a compromised immune system.

• In the 1980s and 1990s

  • The Freedom-to-Farm Act dismantled the costliest price- and income-support programs and freed farmers to produce for global markets without restraints on how many crops they planted.
  • Congress sought to ease the transition by providing farmers $36,000 million in payments over seven years even though crop prices at the time were at high levels.
  • Marketing orders for oranges and some other crops were little changed.
  • Even with these political concessions to farmers, questions remained whether the less controlled system would endure.
  • Under the new law, government supports would revert to the old system in 2002 unless Congress were to act to keep market prices and support payments decoupled.

• Secured vs. Unsecured Funding

  • The financial institution, however, is given security — a lien on the title to the house — until the mortgage is paid off in full.
  • In some legal systems, unsecured creditors who are also indebted to the insolvent debtor are able (and in some jurisdictions, required) to set-off the debts, which actually puts the unsecured creditor with a matured liability to the debtor in a pre-preferential position.