What are cash crops?

Cash crops are grown and produced not for domestic consumption or for trade in internal, local markets, but to be sold on the market. Cash crops were historically very important to the development of the American colonies. For example, sugar was a cash crop produced by plantations on West Indian islands during the colonial period. The entire economy of islands like Barbados was geared toward the production of this crop, and almost every acre of arable land was used to its cultivation. Tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice in the Carolina Low Country played a similar economic role. After the eighteenth century, cotton became as central to the economy of the Deep South as these other crops had been. Like other cash crops, it was purchased by merchants and specialized buyers and sold in distant markets, either in the northern United States, Great Britain, or continental Europe. Of course, all of these crops were cultivated by slave labor, which was deemed essential to making a profit. Today, most farmers produce cash crops, not for local consumption (though this is becoming more common) but for sale on markets far removed from their local economies. Crops like corn, soybeans, and others are grown and sold to large companies who use them to manufacture foods and other items.