Question

During Reconstruction, Southerners who owned plantations farmed their fields

Answer 1

"During Reconstruction, Southerners who owned plantations farmed their fields"

Answer 2

They didn't. They had huge farms that couldn't be managed by a single family and since they didn't have slaves they had to pay workers so they introduced a sharecropping system where African-Americans who needed jobs would work on the land and take a part of the crops, but it soon became very similar to slavery.