Tenant Farms, Tenant Farmers Quotes
There was much unrest caused by many evictions of poor tenant by landlords who were not recognizing any of their “duties”. This problem and the degree of government regulatory and legislative involvement have been on the political agenda for eons and continue to this day. The duties tend to change with times and places; the rights that the property owners assert seem to be constant and uniform.
In Scotland, large land owners who controlled most of the land discovered that they could earn more money from putting sheep on their lands than they could from rents charged to tenant farmers and simply evicted most of the tenant farmers who had no where to go. New Zealand, as a result of McKensie’s efforts passed laws guaranteeing 999 year leases at reasonable prices to any who wanted to farm.
The Irish landlords were a craven and greedy lot. See {639225}.
Landlords would abuse tenant farmers {639644}, and then evict them from their home and farm when they could not pay the rack-rents. The Land League fought back. When a landlord evicted a tenant, they would “urge” all other farmers not to rent that farm. If they did, they might be identified and bad things might happen to their livestock or crops. Few would rent a farm where the previous tenant had been evicted after this “program”.
He had just been released from jail for urging mass demonstrations to prevent tenant farmers from being evicted.
The Southern system of tenant farming and sharecropping left the poor of the South with little better eoonomicly than the Russian peasants of the late 19th century.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children at that time, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this population growth rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35807} and {35808}.
Rack-Renting was the term for a Landlord charging the Tenant farmer an exorbitant rent per year for the right to farm and live on the land. Often the rent for a single year would be an amount equal to the fair market value of the purchase of the entire property, but the Landlords would never sell. The tenant farmers rarely had any alternative as that land had their home such as it was and provided their meager living which generally was only slightly more than the Rack Rent. The Irish National Land League was created to reform the land use and allocation system of Ireland.
