Choice of Agrarian Contracts

Today as we drove through many miles of farmland on our way to Orvieto, I started to notice the amount of crop and potential farmland growth their was around this geographical region. The article, Choice of Agrarian Contracts that I recently read connects with this area of farming and crop production through talking about some practices of sharecropping used in early Italy. In the article, they highlighted three main types of sharecropping contracts. Some of these discussed were owner farmer contracts, share contracts, as well as fixed rent contracts.

The Tuscan land region has two main traditional types of crops, vines and other perennial crops, as well as annual crops, like wheat and other grain. The article dove into the practice of crop mix, as perennial crops were much more high risk so it was most profitable and the lowest risk to mix these types of crops in the land that you had available. 

Later the article discussed how these types of land contracts and sharecropping was very common at the time, and had some advantages and disadvantages for both parties. The main one I would like to highlight that I found most important is how tenants renting out this land did not have any way to borrow money to get this land, and were forced to take out loans from the landowners in order to use this land for crop production. This gave a lot of leverage to landowners at this time in the Tuscan region, and must have enabled them to control contracts and profit much more from the deal than the worker would have. 

Overall, traveling through the Tuscan region in the last few days has been a great experience to see how some of the region is able to produce agriculturally still today, and through reading this article it gives me a better understanding on how the early Tuscan region produced, as well as how it is the same and how it has evolved.