December 6 occupies a consequential spot on the U.S. agricultural calendar—not for planting or harvest, but for policy and societal turning points that reshaped how America grows its food, who does the work, and where the harvests are sold. On this date in 1865, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery and upending the labor system that underpinned Southern agriculture. More than a century later, on December 6, 2012, the U.S. Senate approved legislation granting permanent normal trade relations to Russia, a move that briefly opened (and later complicated) a major market for American farm goods. Taken together, these moments bookend enduring themes in U.S. agriculture: labor, land, and access to markets.

1865: Abolition upends the farm economy

On December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified, declaring that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude… shall exist within the United States.” The immediate moral and legal significance is clear; the practical consequences for American agriculture were equally profound. Before the Civil War, the South’s plantation system relied on enslaved labor to grow cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, and other staples. In 1860, the vast majority of the nearly four million enslaved people in the United States worked in agriculture, and cotton alone dominated the nation’s export earnings.

Abolition instantly removed the coerced labor foundation of that system. But freedom did not come with land. Instead of a broadly realized “40 acres and a mule,” the postwar countryside shifted toward arrangements—sharecropping and tenant farming—that tied freedpeople and many poor whites to landlords and merchants through crop-lien debt. Under the lien, credit for food, seed, and tools often came at punishing interest, to be repaid after harvest with a share of the crop—usually cotton—locking many families into cycles of dependency.

From plantation to sharecropping

With emancipation, formerly enslaved workers negotiated wages, plots, and conditions for the first time. Planters, short on cash and reluctant to pay wages, accepted sharecropping contracts that pushed risk down to laboring families in exchange for a portion of the yield. The new system kept cotton monoculture alive but discouraged diversification and soil-building practices. The results were evident in depleted soils and vulnerable farm finances, particularly when boll weevil infestations spread across the Cotton Belt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Land, power, and a long arc of ownership loss

Despite formidable barriers, Black farmers built cooperatives, acquired land, and, by the early 20th century, owned millions of acres. Over the decades, however, a combination of discriminatory lending, legal challenges in heirs’ property, violence and intimidation, and structural changes in agriculture contributed to a sharp decline in Black landownership. The legacy of December 1865 thus includes not only the end of slavery, but the unresolved question of who owns and controls the land—and who benefits from public programs designed to support agriculture.

Mechanization and migration

Labor arrangements shaped technology adoption. While mechanical cotton pickers existed by the 1930s and 1940s, their widespread use accelerated only as farm labor markets and policies changed during and after World War II. Mechanization, boll weevil pressure, and price volatility pushed millions of rural Southerners—Black and white—into the Great Migration, altering the demographics of both the countryside and the nation’s cities. The modern, capital-intensive farm sector that emerged stands in stark contrast to the labor-dominated agriculture of 1865, and the social geography of American food production bears the imprint of that transition.

2012: A Senate vote opens—and soon complicates—a major export market

On December 6, 2012, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve H.R. 6156, granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to Russia and Moldova and enacting the Magnitsky human rights sanctions. The decision cleared the way for the United States to fully benefit from Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) earlier that year, ending the Cold War–era Jackson-Vanik restrictions.

Why it mattered to farmers

For U.S. agriculture, PNTR promised more predictable access to one of the world’s largest import markets at the time. Russia had been a top buyer of American poultry and a significant market for pork, beef, soybeans, and wheat. PNTR meant lower applied tariffs under WTO commitments and a more formal mechanism for settling sanitary and phytosanitary disputes that often dogged shipments of meat and grains.

What happened next

The promise was real but short-lived. Geopolitical tensions and domestic policies intervened. By 2014, in response to sanctions over Crimea, Russia imposed a sweeping ban on many agricultural imports from the United States and other countries, closing a market that U.S. producers had invested in for decades. The sequence is a vivid reminder that for farmers, “market access” is not purely an economic pillar—it is also shaped by foreign policy, standards disputes, and the durability of trade relationships.

Early December on the land: what this week has traditionally meant on American farms

Beyond headline policy moments, the first week of December has long been a pivot from harvest to planning in much of the country, with a few major exceptions where it is still peak season. Historically, farm families and communities marked this time with a mix of fieldwork, processing, and marketing that underscores the regional diversity of U.S. agriculture.

• Winter wheat and cover crops: Across the Plains and Midwest, fall-planted wheat is in dormancy, and cover crops—rye, clover, radish—are established to protect soil, capture residual nutrients, and build organic matter before spring.
• Cane sugar campaign: In Louisiana and parts of Florida and Texas, sugarcane harvest runs through late fall into winter. The processing “campaign” at mills is a round-the-clock operation, a tradition dating to the 19th century and updated with modern harvesting and milling technology.
• Citrus harvest and freeze vigilance: Florida’s and California’s citrus growers pick early-season varieties while watching for cold snaps. Historic December freezes have reshaped the citrus map more than once, pushing groves southward in Florida and changing varietal choices and risk management.
• Christmas trees to market: From the Cascades and Appalachians to the Upper Midwest, real Christmas tree farms ship the year’s crop in late November and early December. The sector blends forestry and horticulture, with rotations that can span 7–12 years and management geared to soil health, pest control, and uniform form—an agricultural enterprise hiding in plain sight in holiday living rooms.
• Livestock, meat processing, and winter rations: Historically, colder weather meant on-farm butchering and curing in many regions—especially among German- and Scandinavian-American communities around St. Nicholas Day (December 6). Today, the calendar carries forward in different form: feeding programs shift to winter rations, and ranchers monitor water and shelter as storms roll across the Plains and Mountain West.
• Grain marketing and storage: With fall harvest wrapped up for corn and soybeans in the heartland, attention turns to on-farm storage management, basis movements, and forward-pricing decisions that can shape farm income as much as yield.

Threads that tie December 6 together

Three themes run through the history attached to this date. First, labor: from abolition and its aftermath to the modern dynamics of farm employment, the way people work on the land—and who owns it—remains foundational. Second, markets: the 2012 trade vote underscores how access can open quickly and close even faster, reminding producers and policymakers to plan for geopolitical risk alongside weather and prices. Third, resilience: early December is when many farmers button up fields for winter or press on through the tail end of harvest, making practical choices—cover crops, storage, herd care—that determine how well the operation will meet spring.

The story of December 6 is thus both a snapshot and a lens: a day that captures defining breaks in the nation’s agricultural past, and a vantage point to see how policy, people, and practice continue to shape the food system long after the headlines fade.