How did the end of slavery affect agriculture in the South?

Slavery and agriculture are not necessarily my area of expertise, so I'm hoping that someone can expand on this. From what I have read, these large plantations (which only made up a small fraction of slave-based labor) were able to continue in similar forms through share-cropping. Essentially, free blacks were given a shack to live in and a small portion of land to grow their own crops. They worked a bigger portion of the land and had to give a certain percentage of crops to the land owner for "rent." Many could barely survive on the rations they could grow because they could only work their own land after having worked on the plantation all day. Some argue that this was, in itself, a form of slavery that continued in the South for about a century. Anne Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi" discusses her childhood growing up in a share-cropping family in the 1940s and 1950s. It's a great read if you're interested in how share-cropping affected blacks in the South until the Civil Rights movement.

Explanation:

yellow fever and other tropical diseases