Concepts
Cash Crop
Also Known As Profit crop
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A crop grown to sell rather than to eat at home: coffee, cotton, sugarcane, cocoa, tobacco and, in the modern economy, most of what any commercial farm grows. The idea earns its place as one half of a contrast, the other half being the subsistence crop fed to the household and its animals; historically cash crops were a small share of a farm's yield, where today revenue is the point. What a region is pushed to grow for sale, and what that displaces, is a recurring hinge of agricultural history.
Facts
Origin YearThe term cash crop entered English usage with its current meaning in 1868; the practice of growing crops to sell rather than to eat, especially on colonial plantations, is far older. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The economics of what farmers grow to sell rather than to eat is a core agricultural-economics question.
Coffee, Crops Coffee is a standard example of a globally traded cash crop grown almost entirely for export sale.
Cotton, Crops Cotton was among the defining cash crops of the colonial and antebellum plantation economy.
The contrasting poles of why a crop is grown: for the household or for sale
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