MEZZADRIA. — This is an agricultural contract of a typically associative nature, in which the grantor and the sharecropper join together for the cultivation of a farm and for the exercise of activities connected with it, in order to divide the profits equally.
The grantor provides a rural estate, known as a podere; this constitutes a unit of land equipped with rural buildings for housing the sharecropping family and sheltering the livestock, and for storing machinery and the harvest. The podere must be planted with trees and vines and supplied with roads and water. Its extent must be proportionate to the working capacity of the peasant family, so as to ensure its subsistence and a certain continuity of work throughout the agricultural year through a complete rotation of crops.
The sharecropper, as head of the peasant family, undertakes to provide the labour necessary for cultivating the podere, where he resides permanently, with the assistance of his own family members; in this respect m. differs essentially from colonia parziaria, whose economic centre lies in areas not divided into farms.
The live and dead stock are provided entirely by the grantor or equally by the parties, depending on local customs and provincial regulations. This second form is now spreading with the gradual
improvement of the economic conditions of the sharecropping class, also because it is regarded, from a social standpoint, as the most suitable for strengthening those bonds of solidarity and cooperation between capital and labour that constitute the raison d’être of the sharecropping institution.
The contract of m. has a tradition extending back many centuries. Although relations of a similar kind are already mentioned in Mosaic, Babylonian, and Roman law, it gradually asserted itself with its characteristic modern form during the period of the medieval communes and guilds (13th–14th centuries), when the rural plebs, having broken the bonds of feudal serfdom, acquired a new consciousness of economic and civil freedom. The simplicity of the structure of the sharecropping relationship, in its fundamental features, still enables it to enjoy wide diffusion in areas divided into farms (especially in Emilia, the Marche, Abruzzo, Tuscany, and Lazio), with an adaptability to the needs of different agricultural regions, while preserving its economic, social, and juridical unity, enshrined in the labour book of the new Civil Code (arts. 2141–63).
The social aspect of the problem of m. is manifested particularly at the time of the division of the produce, in the management of the farm, and in the duration of the contract.
In accordance with the principles of the new Italian Constitution, principles repeatedly affirmed also in papal encyclicals, the sharecropper must be assured remuneration for his labour in an amount sufficient to guarantee him and his family a free and dignified existence. For this reason, the division of the produce in m. should be carried out in varying proportions according to the productivity of the farms, and in any case always in such a way as to ensure the worker an income meeting the conditions stated above. According to the principles of the Civil Code currently in force, the technical and administrative management of the enterprise belongs to the grantor. He exercises it directly, or through a farm manager or a technician of his confidence, in cooperation with the sharecropper, who, also in his capacity as a small agricultural entrepreneur, thus comes to participate actively in the management of the farm in which he has a financial interest, possibly through farm councils in those agricultural areas where a considerable number of farms are brought together under a single administration, as occurs in Tuscan estates. Finally, the concern to guarantee a certain stability to the sharecropper, who finds both home and work on the podere, and thereby to free him from a position of inferiority towards the grantor arising from his being constantly exposed to fear of the future, seems to be directing the new legislation towards overcoming the liberal conception of the system of evictions. Notice of termination, following the example of the English law on smallholdings (Agricultural holdings act, 1925) and the French law of 13 Apr. 1946 (Du fermage et du métayage), thus appears likely to be made conditional upon the existence of objectively just grounds, according to the so-called principle of “just cause.”
In a social order inspired by the principles of Christian morality, m. is destined to perform a leading function in the moral and material elevation of agricultural workers and in the social pacification of the countryside. Through it, tenant farmers are directly introduced into the cycle of production, with all the rights and obligations arising from it; they share the fortunes of the enterprise in which they work and, through a gradual selection of the best elements, have the possibility of attaining ownership of the land. In this sense and for this purpose, the right of pre-emption is intended to operate, recognizing the sharecropper’s right to be preferred to third parties in the event of the sale of the estate on which he lives and works.