The topic of this Mishnah is going to be either... In this Perek (chapter), we'll talk about three different ways a person could rent his field to farm it. A person could rent it to another as a sharecropper. The renter here would pay a percentage of the crops. Let's say it was 33%. One third of the crops he's going to give to the owner, and he keeps the rest. There's no set amount for rent. The amount that the owner of the field is going to receive depends on the yield that the field produces. That's number one.
Number two is chakirut. Chakirut is a set amount of produce that the renter is obligated to give to the owner. For example, let's say he tells him, “I'm going to give you 1,000 bushels of wheat every single year, and I'm going to keep the rest.” Whatever the field produces becomes irrelevant. The renter here is obligated to provide 1,000 bushels of wheat to the owner of that farm, no matter what. If the field produces a million bushels, he only gives 1,000. If it produces zero bushels of wheat, then the renter here is obligated to go buy wheat and give it to the owner of that field.
The third type of rent is sechirut, a regular rental. The renter here pays a set amount of money. It doesn't matter how much the field produces. It's disconnected. He pays him rent, a certain monetary figure, every single month or every single year.
So now that we spoke about arisut (sharecropper) or chakirut, where the owner would take a percentage or a set amount of the produce, no matter what, we'll apply that to this Mishnah. The Mishnah says that somebody is renting a field from his friend, and they don't have any discussion about how the crops are going to be harvested at the end of the season. The renter here, either the sharecroppers have to, can have to give over 33%, for example, in our case, of his yield or the bushels that are going to have to be handed off. The set amount of bushels, no matter what the yield produces, has to be handed off. But there wasn't discussion about how those crops were going to be harvested. Sometimes they would rather have them cut with a tool. Sometimes they want them just uprooted from the ground. Every method has advantages and disadvantages for how it's detached from the ground. So there's no discussion about that.
If the custom in that place was for farmers to cut them, then the renter here would have to cut them and then hand them off. If the custom was to uproot them, then he would have to uproot them and hand them off. Or, if the custom was to plow the field after the harvest as well, in order to destroy all the weeds, then the renter would have to do that as well. Everything goes according to the local custom. Whatever was done has to continue to be done.
Now we'll talk about the sharecropper specifically. It says that he shares more than just the crop with the field's owner. The sharecropper, who's giving over a certain percentage of whatever he produces, doesn't just have to hand over a share of the crop, of the grain, but even the inedible parts of the grain as well. The straw and the stubble. They have some sort of use. They could be used to fuel a fire. Maybe they could be used for animal food. So that has to be given over as well to the owner, not simply just the edible part of the grain.
If we're talking about a vineyard over here, just as the sharecropper and the owner share the actual wine that the vine produces, they also share the branches that are trimmed from those vines. At the end of the season, they also share the poles that supported those vines when they were growing. They both have to share these poles because the poles are provided by both of them. They both share in setting up the poles at the beginning of the season in order to support all of the vines. Therefore, when they're breaking up at the end of the season, they share the poles as well. They divide them back according to how they were originally.