Peasants owned only about 40 percent of the land, leasing or sharecropping the rest from the nobility, the urban middle class, and the church. Population growth and subdivision of the land from generation to generation was reducing the margin of subsistence for many families. Innovations in estate...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sharecropping
In 1997 the U.S. census reported just 2,607 tenant farmers in Georgia, with no special classification for sharecropping. Prior to these developments, however, from the 1870s through the 1940s, sharecropping was a labor system that kept poor black and white Georgians working in agriculture.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping
in the South. ...$372 per capita in 1929, while income outside the South was $797 per capita. Chronic overproduction of cotton, with its attendant low prices, forced more and more farmers, both black and white, into sharecropping; between 1880 and 1930 Southern land tenancy increased from 36 to 55 percent.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sharecropping
Sharecropping in Georgia ended in the mid-twentieth century, in part because workers left the fields for southern and northern cities. Black Georgians left the state for a variety of reasons, and landowners sought new technologies to make cotton growing possible (and less expensive) with fewer people in the fields.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping
Despite the common perception that sharecropping was a black institution, sharecroppers were drawn from the ranks of all poor Georgians. In 1910, of the state's 27 million farm acres, tenants operated 11 million acres; black Georgians farmed slightly more than half of this tenant-tilled acreage.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping
...the most advanced in Europe, a model for improving landlords elsewhere. In central and southern France and in central Italy, urban investment in the land was closely linked to a special type of sharecropping lease, called the métayage in France and the mezzadria in Italy.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sharecropping
Charles W. Chesnutt would write in The Wife of His Youth and Other stories of the Color Line (1900) as well as in his novels of the convict lease system that imprisoned black men in the same manner as sharecropping.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brown/sharecropping.htm
...rural South made a living by renting small plots of land from large landowners who were usually white and pledging a percentage of their crops to the landowners at harvest—a system known as sharecropping. Landowners provided sharecroppers with land, seeds, tools, clothing, and food.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sharecropping
By 1880, 32 percent of the state's farms were operated by sharecroppers; this figure would increase in the fifty years following. By 1910 sharecroppers operated 37 percent of the state's 291,027 farms. Tenancy rates in general and sharecropping rates in particular were highest in those portions of the state that grew mostly cotton.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/sharecropping
Set from the 1940s to the 1970s, Gaines's works illustrate that not much had changed for black people in some parts of the South. Alice Walker's characters would find sharecropping equally inescapable in The Third Life Of Grange Copeland (1970). Grange finally manages to steal away under cover of darkness, but his son Brownfield allows himself to become so damaged by the system that he kills his wife.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brown/sharecropping.htm
when was sharecropping most popular
Sharecropping was most popular in 1870.