Question

How did farming change in the South after the Civil war?

Answer 1

Hint: Many small farmers were thrown into debt and hunger by the widespread devastation of the war, causing many to resort to cotton cultivation. The growth in commercial fertiliser supply and the expansion of railroads into white upland areas has intensified the spread of commercial agriculture.

Complete answer:
Around a third of Americans worked in agriculture at the end of the \[{19^{th}}\] century, compared to only about four percent today. Rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer after the Civil War. In the South, tenants were in charge of one third of all landholdings.
Since the Civil War, the economic lives of planters, former slaves, and non-slaveholding whites have changed. During Restoration, the most daunting challenge facing many Southerners was to devise a new method of labour to replace the broken world of slavery. Farmers have found it difficult to adapt to the end of slavery. Many tried to restore the old discipline, accustomed to absolute control over their labour force, only to meet determined opposition from the freedmen, who equated freedom with economic autonomy. Many small white farmers, thrown into poverty by the war, entered into cotton production during Reconstruction, a major shift from pre-war days when they focused on growing food for their own families.
New labour systems slowly emerged from the plantation conflicts to take the place of slavery. The cotton and tobacco South was dominated by sharecropping, while wage labour was the rule on sugar plantations.

Note: Many former slaves believed they were given a claim to land by their years of unrequited labour; "forty acres and a mule" became their rallying cry. White reluctance to sell to blacks, and the decision of the federal government not to redistribute land in the South, meant that landowners were only a small percentage of the freed people.